by Paul Williams, South Shore YMCA Nature Center, Member Services
There are four very small new residents at the South Shore YMCA Nature Center this fall.
Each can fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. These four northern red-bellied cooters are part of one of Massachusetts’ longest running conservation efforts and for the next several months, the Nature Center gets to play a small but very real role in their future.
The South Shore YMCA Nature Center is participating in MassWildlife’s Northern Red-bellied Cooter Headstart Program, which has been helping restore this endangered Massachusetts turtle since 1984.
And “head start” is a pretty good description of exactly what we are giving them.
Meet the Red-bellied Cooter
Northern red-bellied cooters are large freshwater turtles native to southeastern Massachusetts. They prefer ponds with plenty of aquatic vegetation and places to bask in the sun.
And they can get surprisingly big.
Adult females can have shells more than a foot long and are considerably larger than males. Their name comes from the reddish or orange coloring of the plastron—the underside of the shell. Younger turtles often have especially vivid coloration and markings.
Like all turtles, their shell isn’t something they simply carry around. It is a living part of their skeleton, connected to the ribs and spine.
Red-bellied cooters are also primarily herbivores as adults, feeding heavily on aquatic vegetation. And because turtles are ectothermic, they rely on their surroundings to regulate their body temperature. That’s why you might see turtles stretched out on a log on a sunny day. They aren’t just relaxing—they’re warming their bodies so they can function.
But life is very different when you’re a hatchling.
A newly hatched northern red-bellied cooter is only about an inch long. At that size, almost everything is bigger than you, and predators are a serious threat.
That’s where the Headstart Program comes in.
A Little Help Through the First Winter
Each year, MassWildlife places hatchlings with participating schools, museums, nature centers and other partners. Instead of spending their first winter outside, the turtles live in carefully maintained aquariums where they receive warmth, food and regular care.
For four of them, that temporary home is now the South Shore YMCA Nature Center.
Our job is pretty straightforward:
Help them grow.
Keeping the turtles warm and well-fed allows them to continue growing during a season when their wild counterparts would grow very little. By spring, a headstarted turtle can be roughly the size of a considerably older turtle in the wild.
Bigger turtles are harder for many predators to eat.
It doesn’t eliminate the challenges of life in the wild. It simply improves the odds.
After approximately eight or nine months, the turtles are returned to MassWildlife. Biologists measure and identify them before releasing them into suitable habitat in southeastern Massachusetts.
Since the program began more than four decades ago, thousands of headstarted turtles have been released. Some have survived to adulthood and reproduced, making today’s hatchlings part of a conservation story spanning generations.
Conservation Close to Home
That may be my favorite part of having these turtles at the Nature Center.
Conservation can sometimes feel enormous. We hear about endangered species, biodiversity and habitat loss, and it can be difficult to imagine what any one person or organization can actually do about them.
Then four tiny turtles arrive at a nature center in Norwell.
Suddenly conservation isn’t abstract.
It’s checking an aquarium, feeding a turtle and measuring its growth. It’s a child visiting the Nature Center and discovering that an endangered animal lives practically in their own backyard.
And maybe that child looks at the pond down the street a little differently afterward.
The South Shore is filled with interconnected habitats; forests, wetlands, rivers, salt marshes, estuaries and ponds. The northern red-bellied cooter is part of that living landscape.
For the next several months, four of them will call the South Shore YMCA Nature Center home. They’ll grow. Our visitors will learn about them, and I suspect we’ll learn quite a bit from them, too.
Then, sometime next spring, they’ll return to the wild, bigger than when they arrived and with a better chance of becoming one of those large adult turtles someday basking on a log in a southeastern Massachusetts pond.
There is something wonderfully hopeful about that.
Conservation doesn’t always begin with a massive project. Sometimes it begins with four tiny turtles and a head start.