Summer Internship Week 8

July 7th, 2022

So this week has been waay better than last week. Thank god for that. We re-opened to new intakes this week after being closed for a while. We've been getting a lot of bunnies and baby birds. We got a pair of baby cedar waxwings, a baby hummingbird, and a young bluebird. We also got two baby bats! Baby bats are cute, but in an ugly-cute kind of way. We also got an adult female painted turtle that was found by an intern after being run over by a car on the road. This brings me to what I wanted to talk about today: turtles!

We have a lot of different species of turtles in Pennsylvania. My personal favorites are the Eastern Box Turtle and the Wood Turtle. Most of the turtles we get at Centre Wildlife Care come to us because they have been hit by cars. Lots of turtles hit by cars while crossing the road are nesting females. Individual turtles of most species have a small area where they spend the majority of their lives. Female turtles will move around inside their range or leave their range when laying their eggs in the summertime. This makes many turtles come into contact with roads and cars, which never ends well. One of the wood turtles and one of the box turtles at CWC have laid eggs in the clinic. Sadly raising the eggs is very difficult, so the vast majority of them don't ever hatch.

Eastern Box Turtles (Scientific Name: Terrapene carolina) are probably my favorite kind of turtle! They live in forested areas in the eastern U.S. and consist on a diet of fruit, mushrooms, slugs, worms, and even carrion. By looking at an Eastern Box Turtle turtle, you can tell the sex and general age of the individual. With Eastern Box Turtles, males have a concave lower shell (the part of the shell on the underside of the turtle is known as the plastron) and often have red eyes and are more brightly colored. Female Eastern Box Turtles have a flat plastron and are generally less colorful. The way to tell the age of an Eastern Box Turtle is to count the number of rings on the turtle's shell (which are known as annuli). Counting all but the first ring will give you a general idea of the turtle's age. Box Turtles that are very old will have an entirely smooth shell. These turtles could be anywhere from 50 to over 100 years old. Something very unique about Box Turtles is that they have a shell with a hinge on it, meaning they are able to completely shut their shell and hide their front and back legs. The photos below are from my own personal work with turtles.

Female Box Turtle

Male Box Turtle

Box Turtle's hinged shell

My other favorite turtle is the Wood Turtle (Scientific name: Glyptemys insculpta) ! Wood Turtles live in rivers and streams, wetlands, and riparian forests (forests bordering a river). Wood Turtles eat a lot of the same things that Eastern Box Turtles do, except they also eat some aquatic organisms such as tadpoles. While they are slow on land, Wood Turtles move incredibly fast in the water. Wood Turtles can be sexed and aged in the same way as Eastern Box Turtles, by looking at their plastron and by counting the rings on their shell.

Female Wood Turtle

Male Wood Turtle

CWC also has a lot of turtles that are kept as educational ambassadors. We have three box turtles, two musk turtles, a wood turtle, a spotted turtle, a snapping turtle, and a diamondback terrapin. Many of our educational turtles were illegal pets, but some of them have permanent wounds that make them unreleasable.

Harvey, one of CWC's educational ambassadors

Baby Blue Jay

Baby Ruby-Throated Hummingbird

Baby Big Brown Bat