Walking through the parking lots and trails of Petrie Island on a chilly November weekend, fedora-hatted Michael Ricco can still point out exact spots alongside pavement and wetland where turtles laid eggs last summer.
Muskrats glide through the water while great blue herons hunt on the opposite shore. It’s a grey day and months past turtle nesting season, but Ricco still takes the time to gently inform a camera-laden passerby that her dog isn’t allowed here for ecological reasons. The woman responds apologetically and loops back to her car without a fuss.
This 291-hectare conservation area, owned by the City of Ottawa since the 1990s after operating privately as a sand quarry, sticks out into the Ottawa River near Orléans. With towering trees, sandy beaches and 12 kilometres of shoreline, the island remains a key nesting ground for hundreds of Ontario’s at-risk freshwater turtles.
Last summer marked the second year of a turtle egg incubation project jointly run here by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF), Friends of Petrie Island (FOPI) and Ottawa Riverkeeper. With Friends of Petrie Island gathering eggs around the island and Ottawa Riverkeeper hatching them safely in the NCC River House’s science lab, hundreds of baby turtles are defying their odds of survival before even hitting the water.
Ricco is the president of Friends of Petrie Island. He’s volunteered with the group since it formed in the late 1990s, has authored multiple books about the island while studying at Ottawa’s School of Photographic Arts. He says today’s incubation work builds on a decades-long legacy.
“The turtle conservation project isn’t anything new,” he noted, calling FOPI the “unsung heroes” of it. “It’s just come on a larger scale in the past few years.”
Saving nests from annihilation
While difficult to estimate populations, Petrie Island could have as many as 300 painted turtles, 150 northern map turtles and 150 snapping turtles — all at-risk species — according to Malcolm Fenech, who served the last two summers as consulting biologist for the incubation project. On some parts of the island, Fenech has seen turtles “side by side by side” laying eggs.
Yet, “if you go to the island during nesting season, it’s like up to 95 per cent of the turtle nests are [predated],” he said, especially by raccoons and skunks.
Fenech, now a program manager with the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources, visited the island as a graduate student hoping to deliver a project that would last for more than just two or three years. In 2023, he obtained funding for an incubator that’s helped the project house and hatch turtle eggs out of predators’ reach the last two summers.
“The incubator allows for a stronger chance for the eggs to hatch,” Ricco said, estimating that “the ones that we collect and keep in the incubator, that just represents maybe 10 per cent of the total number of eggs that are laid.”
Without incubation support, it’s common for upwards of 60 per cent of eggs in a nest to be predated, according to David Seburn, a CWF freshwater turtle specialist. The summer before the incubator arrived, Ricco recalled, all known turtle nests on Petrie Island were predated. But while these unprotected eggs could have a survival rate as low as one in 20, Ottawa Riverkeeper estimates, the work at Petrie Island rose the hatch rate to 83 per cent for the 427 eggs gathered this year.
Protecting these eggs and helping the hatchlings reach the river “looks really good from a funding perspective, as well as an education perspective,” Fenech said. More than 600 members of public registered and attended this last summer to watch FOPI release 354 turtles, which Fenech called a “huge win” for the incubation project.
“A lot of conservation doesn’t involve the public,” he said. “They don’t get to see the results.”
At CWF, Seburn values this collaborative conservation effort with FOPI.
“Petrie Island is a hotspot for turtles in the Ottawa area and most of the nests get predated by raccoons and other predators,” he said. “It has been a pleasure to work in partnership with the FOPI and ensure hundreds of eggs hatch out and the hatchlings get released back at Petrie.”
Helping turtles
To gather eggs for incubation, 30 to 40 volunteers work with FOPI in the spring to locate turtle nests. They find them anywhere from slopes off the walking trails, to burrows on the beaches, to edges of human-frequented parking spaces.
While most of these nesting turtles were likely born on Petrie Island, it’s possible some of them “lay their eggs [approximately] where they themselves were laid however many years ago,” Ricco said—even in cases where sand has become parking lot. “It’s very predictable for us to know where they’re going.”
Elizabeth Grater, Ottawa Riverkeeper’s science programs co-ordinator who’s involved with incubation, said emphasis fell this year on gathering eggs from species other than snapping turtles.
“They tend to lay two to three times more eggs compared to some of the other turtles,” Grater said, with their clutches having anywhere between 25 and 60 eggs, while map and painted turtles usually only produce six to 12.
At the River House, Ottawa Riverkeeper’s two interactive educational days last August also attracted nearly 600 visitors, while the turtles continued incubating over two or three months. Some babies hatched a week or two early, to Grater’s excitement, then the turtles were returned to the island within a few days.
“For some of us who have watched them go from being collected as eggs and then incubated all summer and then, in the lab, growing up finally go and take their first swims in the water, it’s very, very cute,” she said.
Back on the shores, FOPI gathers a waitlist of participants to view the turtles up close in containers, before releasing them in batches of a couple dozen onto the sand so they can shuffle off into their new wide world.
“The map turtles are quite shy,” Grater said. “We try to give them a little bit of space from the [other] turtles.”
In contrast, “the snapping turtles are super eager” and “go quickly into the water,” while the map turtles “need a little bit of pushing toward the water” as they freeze and hide in their shells, or turn to walk back into their container.
“They need a compass,” Grater joked.
Even with humans around, the turtles must still mind predators.
“Last summer at one of the releases,” Grater recalled, “a big frog came and ate one of the turtles in front of everyone. I think it was a little bit startling.”
She added this is part of a natural cycle not to be disrupted—and good food for frogs.
Risks encountered throughout these turtles’ lives depend on their behaviour. Painted turtles like nesting near roads and more commonly die there. Map turtles face higher risk of being hit by boats, while snapping turtles are safer because they spend more time deeper underwater.
As well, “it can be an indicator of poor water quality if you’re seeing less and less of these turtles,” Grater said.
At the same time, Seburn notes the abundance of turtles at Petrie Island, despite them living just downriver from Ottawa and its fluctuating water quality.
Along with being good bioindicators, turtles are “nature’s composter” that eat dead fish and other environmental waste, Fenech said.
Future conservation
While the work at Petrie Island doesn’t track hatched turtles later into life, Grater said it protects them at the most vulnerable point, when they can’t yet defend themselves from inside their egg.
“One of our collaborators has mentioned before that if 10 per cent of the baby turtles survive to maturity, he would be happy,” she said. “It does show that a lot of them are not going to survive, but if we can have a greater number of hatchlings, that can at least mean that there’s a larger number that are going to make it to maturity.”
As a start, Fenech has managed to track some turtles’ journeys by painting numbers on their shells. One female map turtle ended up nearly five kilometres down the Ottawa River, while others move between Ottawa and Gatineau.
As turtles shed the scutes on their shells like snakes shed skin, painted numbers aren’t a long-term solution, Seburn said, but they could continue helping document longer movements, granted that permits are obtained to catch the turtles.
Fenech hopes a future researcher can analyze what impact this incubation work has on turtle populations. (As global temperatures rise, he’s wary that more female and fewer male turtles could be born). Though he won’t be involved next year, he looks forward to the project continuing at Petrie Island.
“A lot of conservation projects don’t make it past three years, and this will be the fifth year of really doing this,” Fenech said.
Grater encourages people to submit turtle photos and observations to iNaturalist, which the CWF uses to track and support local turtle activity. Come spring 2025, people can also sign up with FOPI to help gather eggs next season.
“Raising these turtles is one thing, but also allowing people to come interact with these turtles and really see the importance in protecting turtles, I think that’s really important,” Grater said.
“We can’t just talk about the turtles without showing you where their home is,” Ricco said. “They’ve been living there a lot longer than we have.”
