“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
This simple line from the Mock Turtle’s song in Alice in Wonderland always struck me as profound. Like an argument, a pond has two (or more) sides. A deep pond has shallow spaces in it. Those shallow spaces are teaming with aquatic insects, and lined with boggy aquatic plants.
Which is why this article surprised me.
Pet Talk: A summer spent saving turtles
Last summer, two rising second-year veterinary students traded blue lab coats and lecture halls in Urbana for chest-high waders and wetlands in Lake County in northeast Illinois.
Human development and ecological imbalance, such as an abundance of beavers, has destroyed or altered areas where Blanding’s turtles live. For example, in Illinois, dwindling numbers of large predators has led to an increase in the beaver population. Beavers make dams, creating deeper ponds with little water flow and pushing out the Blanding’s turtles, which prefer shallower areas.
The Blanding turtle is a relative of the red-eared slider, which we in Martinez know very well thrives in beaver ponds. So I rushed to the library to find out if this was true. It sounded doubtful, because one of the nost valuable things beavers bring is stream complexity, with braids, channels, and different sections that appeal to different creatures at different periods in their lives. I thought surely if beavers were such a substantial threat to Blanding turtles I’d find all kind of research on the subject.
Guess how much I found? I’ll give you a hint. It’s a ROUND number.
So why care about saving an endangered species? Biodiversity! It is important that we conserve and save native plants and animals to prevent extinction of natural ecosystems. Losing a single species can result in a detrimental domino effect on the rest of the ecosystem in which that species resides.
Gosh darn those pesky beavers and their stubborn and wanton daily destruction of b-i-o-d-i-v-e-r-s-i-t-y. If there’s one thing that troubles me about these animals it’s the barren ponds they create, like watery deserts where they live the solitary lives of bitter beaver misers….
What’s that? Beaver ponds are TEAMING WITH BIODIVERSITY?
Including Blanding turtles?
Here’s expert naturalist Bob Arnebeck from New York writing about them on his web page:
I’ve found Blanding’s Turtles in shallow fresh water bogs that only fill with water in the spring that are no bigger than a driveway. Indeed, I’ve seen two turtles, both almost nine inches long, living in such a small bog. I’ve also found them in large beaver ponds,
Here’s New Hamshire Wildlife bulletin writing about them in their technical manual.
Here;s what the Species at risk public registry in Nova Scotia has to say (who hates beavers more than anyone) observed:
Extensive beaver activity is also apparent at most known Blanding’s turtle sites in Nova Scotia.
Meaning where one lives, the other thrives.
How about this Master’s thesis by Tamessa Hartwig from New York on specific habitat observations of the Blanding turtle which has several observations about beaver habitat including this one:
HABITAT SELECTION OF BLANDING’S TURTLE (EMYDOIDEA BLANDINGII): ARANGE-WIDE REVIEW AND MICROHABITAT STUDY
In addition, turtles in W isconsin hibernated in a beaver flowage at the mouth of a creek and in borrow pits (Wilder, 2003)
The sad truth is of course is that the poor Blanding Turtle’s habitat overlaps most precisely with the voracious “human people habitat”. Which means as our subdivisions and culverts concrete up the earth there is less and less space for them, and that’s just too dam bad because we don’t care.
So we blame beavers.
