Some turtle patients from the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro are spending the winter at Bridgewater College – giving the students hands-on experience with rehabilitation. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Inside the McKinney Center for Science and Mathematics at Bridgewater College on a recent Friday morning, six woodland box turtles slowly scraped around plastic tubs with shallow baths of water.
[sound of turtle claws scraping]
CHASE CARTER: Currently we have them set up for their soak, so they get about three hours of time to just sit in water. They get this little mat, so that way they have a surface to grip on.
Chase Carter is a sophomore studying environmental science with a minor in wildlife biology. She's taking a practicum course on wildlife rehabilitation this semester – part of the college's partnership with the Wildlife Center of Virginia. Center Co-founder Ed Clark and Senior Vice President Amanda Nicholson are both Bridgewater alumni, and the two institutions have collaborated on research for years. The college was recently permitted with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources as a satellite rehabilitation facility for the wildlife center.
Carter puts on nitrile gloves and picks up one of the turtles – it's a bit bigger than one hand, with a yellow and brown, dappled shell and red eyes. It speaks to us, quietly.
[turtle hisses and chirps]
She walks me through the body condition checks they conduct to monitor the turtles' health.
CARTER: We try to get the head out, and luckily this guy likes to stick his head out, but we kind of grab back here – we want to put our fingers back here because, as you can see they like to tuck in. … They're very strong. You want to pull their head out. … When we do that, we will feel the top of their head, just to feel that bump, and we do it very gently as well.
HAGI: So how does his feel?
CARTER: He feels like, you can visually see that he's got that bump overtop, and when you feel it, it's strong, so I would rate him a three, which for us that means that he's not underweight, he's not overweight, he's a healthy turtle!
The program launched in the fall with a seminar in which Wildlife Center staff gave lectures on rehabilitation once a week.
DR. KARRA PIERCE: It might be about physical exams, euthanasia, turtle husbandry.
Dr. Karra Pierce is the Wildlife Center's veterinary director. She said some of the Bridgewater turtles came to the center as confiscated, illegal pets – others, with injuries.
PIERCE: One of them actually had an oral abscess, so basically an ear infection that was treated at the Wildlife Center. That's now healed, but it's winter, so the turtle can't go back. … When spring comes, he'll be released back to the wild.
He can't go directly from treatment into the winter weather because box turtles in the wild are currently in a state of dormancy called brumation.
PIERCE: They kind of just hunker down in one spot and ride out the winter. … Usually it's going to be under some loose soil, leaf litter, mud, a place where temperatures stay more stable. They just want to kind of maintain a stable temperature. They might dig down a little bit to where the ground isn't going to freeze quite as much.
Having these medically stable turtles spend the winter at Bridgewater frees up space at the Wildlife Center for patients in need. As for the college students –
PIERCE: Wildlife rehabilitation has really become much more specialized, and there are really few formal academic pathways for people to receive training in this, or to receive training in working with wildlife in general, so this partnership is really going to help fill that gap … between classroom learning and then real-world, hands-on wildlife care.
Bridgewater College Professor Tamara Johnstone-Yellin said most of the students in this program are environmental science or biology majors looking to work with wildlife.
TAMARA JOHNSTONE-YELLIN: Many of them have the wildlife minor as well, and some of them are pre-vet or just interested in animals. And the main point of this program is to get them hands-on experience that they may not otherwise get. So as a pre-veterinary student, you have to have a certain number of clinic hours handling animals, and so this allows them to do that, but in a wildlife context, which is very different than a domestic animal context.
That includes growing and preparing the turtles' food.
JOHNSTONE-YELLIN: So this is the slurry that we make [pops open canister] and it is based mostly on green leafy vegetables like kale, which we grow here. … We make up big batches and stick them in the freezer so we can just pull as needed. But it's made of the green leafies that we grow here. This is what's called a primate biscuit, which is a complete diet, so we mush that up and add that. Some apples, some carrots, some broccoli, sometimes an orange. … And then the topper, sometimes it's tomatoes – today's a tomato day. Sometimes it's a meat-based protein, and then we also have our colonies of invertebrates – our superworms and mealworms.
They also clean and disinfect the turtles' separate habitats, each boasting leaves, wood chips, dirt, hidey-holes, a wet rag, a small water pool, and a sun rock under a heat lamp. Emma Pultz, a senior biology major, is interning at the Wildlife Center in addition to taking this course.
EMMA PULTZ: When I first took the class I didn't really know what I was doing and what I wanted to do after college, but since then I've become really interested in rehabilitating wildlife or becoming a wildlife vet tech.
The goal is for the Bridgewater program to expand to other species in the future, permits depending. The next group of patients may be aquatic turtles.
Full disclosure, Bridgewater College underwrites programming on WMRA.
