We are excited to be working with a client who will be donating a portion of their land for conservation of rare species. The area has been identified as the habitat of the Wood Turtle, a dragonfly called the Brook Snaketail, and the fresh water mussel called by several names including Creeper.
Now that sounds like a fun one to work on. If that is a picture from the site, you need to keep an eye out for a submission to the next RPLS.com calendar!
The only project like that I got to work on was way back - about 28 years ago. Folks were donating a swamp to the regional university to study a 'special' water moccasin that had some very slightly different marking on it. We did the survey in the summer with at least a foot of water standing on the whole site.
definitely watch where you're walking...
The photograph is copied from Google. I do have some photographs of the Wood Turtle from another project, but, I can't locate them.
I learned a lot about these turtles on the other project. We were building a bridge in a remote area for DOT. The project had a turtle advisor, and we needed to barricade the entrances, and exits to the project each day to prevent turtle injuries. The barricade consisted of plywood boards two-feet high, and was put up each day when we left to go home.
Surprisingly I only saw the turtles one day during the two year duration of the project. That day there were four very healthy looking turtles. I, and our endangered species program host became very excited about the sightings. No turtles were harmed.
