Over the past year, the Nova Scotia Nature Trust introduced several stewardship interventions at Sand Beach, a protected conservation land that is also a popular local recreation destination. Staff and volunteers installed a gate and boulders to reduce vehicle entry onto the land, as well as educational signage in conjunction with targeted community outreach to help users understand the vulnerability of the species at risk who also use the land. 

During a monitoring visit in June, the Nature Trust were thrilled to find multiple tracks of Snapping Turtles looking for nest sites!  

June is nesting season for snappers, and there had clearly been several females out the night before, all looking for the right nest site.  Turtle nests look like not much more than a patch of disturbed soil, and even this disappears as the rain and wind smooth it away and the eggs incubate.  A recreational vehicle (like an ATV) passing over a nest would crush the eggs, and even the adult females could be killed if they were hit. 

While Snapping Turtles remain fairly common in most watersheds in Nova Scotia, they are listed as provincially vulnerable and any activity that causes adult mortality poses an elevated risk to this species. We are hopeful that these tracks mean that multiple clutches of eggs are slowly incubating and will hatch into tiny, grumpy-looking turtles in the fall.

When Stewardship Manager Joanna Skomorowski saw these Snapping Turtle tracks, she exclaimed, “It looks like a turtle convention!”

Nova Scotia Nature Trust
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