Nine adult female Blanding's turtles were released into a man-made pond in a private section of Brookfield Zoo July 16. On Friday, the St. Charles Park District will be honored for its involvement in the recovering the Blanding's turtles, an endangered species. (Chuck Berman, Chicago Tribune)
If you've ever been to the Hickory Knolls Discovery Center in St. Charles, you've probably seen them – about a dozen Blanding's turtles, an endangered species native to Illinois and the Great Lakes region.
The turtles, which have what looks like bright yellow smiles on their faces, live at the center in a 500-gallon aquatic habitat that includes a pond, a small waterfall and a beach.
On Friday, the St. Charles Park District is being honored by the Illinois Parks and Recreation Association for the exhibit, its efforts to educate people about the endangered species and its involvement in the Blanding's Turtle Recovery Project, an initiative coordinated by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County.
The turtles housed in the St. Charles facility will be used to breed more turtles that are then tagged and let out into the wild or sent to other participating agencies to grow in protected environments, according to Pam Otto, manager of natural programs and interpretive services at the park district.
Students in the St. Charles Community Unit School District 303 and other neighboring districts take field trips to the center to learn about the Blanding's turtle and other conservation efforts going on in the park district.
"A lot of classes, a lot of community groups either have a need or a want or a desire to learn about endangered species," Otto said.
Over the years, the number of turtles has dwindled for many reasons. Not only has development on wetlands destroyed their natural habitat, the species also has several unique characteristics working against it, like its low reproductive rate and late sexual maturity — an average of 15 years for females.
Whereas snapping turtles can lay up to 80 eggs each year, a Blanding's turtle will only lay four or six, Otto said.
Their mortality is fairly high, too, because of their relatively mobile lifestyle and large number of animals that prey on them.
That's why the project participants will collect eggs, hatch them and let the turtles grow for a couple years, said Dan Thompson, an ecologist who leads the project at the DuPage County's Forest Preserve District.
"Nest predation is extremely severe so we're ... trying to bypass these issues until we can correct them naturally," Thompson said.
Today, most of the Hickory Knolls pond's inhabitants are hibernating for the winter, but one female — named "Number 2" for the two marked on her back — continues to swim and bask in the sun lamp's light.
Number 2 no longer hibernates, Otto explained, after undergoing a hysterectomy the last time she laid eggs.
"Her shell wasn't developed to the extent where she could actually pass the eggs, so they had to do a C-section," Otto said.
But one of the eggs broke in the process, so the hysterectomy was done to avoid sepsis, she said.
Thompson said growing up in captivity may have contributed to Number 2's smaller size. He added that he hopes to construct more facilities like the one at the Brookfield Zoo, which houses an outdoor breeding-and-release program that minimizes human interaction and keeps out predators with an electric fence.
"It allows snails, all this stuff to move in and out of this large cage," said Bill Zeigler, senior vice president of collections and animal care at the zoo. "By doing that you get an animal that when you release it isn't acclimated by being fed by hand."
Still, having the turtles on display at the St. Charles center and other facilities in the Chicago area has helped increase awareness about the endangered species. And the more people know about the Blanding's, the more successful the project will be.
"(The St. Charles district has) a wonderful display at the center where people can watch and see the turtles swimming around," Thompson said. "With our captive population we still have a resource to recolonate this area."
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