Box Turtle Rescue Update - Cincinnati Zoo

Hey everybody. We thought you would enjoy a little box turtle update here from the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. These are from the group of box turtles that we gathered up from a school near Dayton that was slated for demolition. So the Division of Wildlife reached out to see if we could help with their care while we work on figuring out some spots where they can live out their turtle lives in the wild. So I'm here with Jenna from our reptile team who's going to share a little update on how the turtle care is going these days. Hi guys. So we gathered 24 box turtles from the school area and we divided them into two separate turtle habitats. So this guy's really active. This is one of our males. You can tell by super bright red eyes. He's very beautiful in color. And then we've got one of our females here. He's being a little shy. A little bit more shy. So 19 of our adults are actually in this outdoor area where they get exposure to all of the weather and the climate of Cincinnati that we have here. Helps them kind of get ready for a long winter. So we have various leaf piles, pine straw for them to kind of hunker down under. As the leaves start to fall, we're going to give them a very solid layer of leaf litter to help them go into brumation. So it'll allow a bit of insulation for them to dig down under there. It's a little different than mammals hibernating. They don't really go to sleep. They just really slow down their metabolism. So they're not going to come out very much. They're not really going to eat. They're going to kind of hunker down until spring is ready for them. They may come up occasionally if there's a warm winter day and we'll obviously keep an eye out for that. But we've seen some really exciting breeding behavior even while they're in here. So when we find really great sites to release them, hopefully we'll be releasing females with some eggs inside. That'd be great. Yeah, fox turtles in our region, they are a species of conservation concern. So it was really important for us to make sure that we can save every individual possible. And we're going to use the winter while they're chilling underground brumating to work with our partners and friends at the Division of Wildlife. And then a lot of our local and regional landowners and land managers and park districts and land conservancies that might be really great habitat for these little turtle friends of ours to live out their lives in the wild. We'll continue to monitor them, which is an important part of this. We are very pleased that when we posted this story, a lot of people already knew that it's best to not take a box turtle home when you find it on a trail. They are happily living their lives in generally the woods. If they're not in immediate danger from dogs or certainly like crossing a road, it's best to just leave them alone to live their lives out. So it was really heartening to see that many people knew that rehoming box turtles was not the most ideal thing for the box turtle friends. But in this case, it was really important that we found them new homes since the school was slated for demolition. So there's some protocols being tested right now and there's been a lot of success with repatriating box turtles from other state agencies with our neighboring states and have had a really high success rate. So we'll be mirroring that protocol for these little ladies and gentlemen, which is great. One of the things that will be necessary is to understand, as Jenna was saying, what does the wild population look like right now. So these sites, it'll be quite the vetting process to make sure that we're setting them up for success as they find new homes. However, we also want to make sure that our wild populations stay healthy. So those sites that we might consider releasing them into or having soft releases, there'll be some really fun work to find out what kind of box turtle populations they currently have, do some swabs, make sure that they're healthy and we're not mixing up any potential pathogens that they could have had. So a really exciting winter ahead for these guys. Lots of rest. Lots of time underground. And then come spring, we'll find some new homes and probably share some updates in between about what will happen to them next.