[G&G] "That used to be a bog, and that used to be a bog, and that," JJ Apodaca says, pointing to neatly mowed ditches as we wind through the rural valleys of the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains in his field truck. To the casual observer, the landscape looks...normal, dotted with farmhouses and livestock. But not if you’re a bog turtle."Historically, before these valleys were drained for agriculture, this landscape would have been covered in bogs," Apodaca says. As I learn later when I walk through one, bogs in this part of the country are grassy, flooded meadows fed by springs. They’re muddy, a little treacherous to cross if you don’t know where to step, and home to the smallest and rarest turtle in North America.
Not that anyone would know it. You could tramp through a bog a hundred times over and never see one. Bog turtles are tiny—quarter-sized as babies, about four inches long as adults—and they burrow in the mud and thick rushes. To find them, Apodaca and his team of biologists use broom handles to gently poke through vegetation and muck—"just listening for that thunk."
Since 2014, Apodaca, a biologist and geneticist based in Asheville and the director of conservation and science at the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, has been on a mission to drag the Southern population of bog turtles back from the edge of extinction. It’s no easy task. Everything seems to be working against the turtles, from their own biology (females take five to ten years to mature and then lay only two or three eggs per clutch) to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat to, perhaps most gravely, the threat of poachers. Being tiny and impossibly cute is not advantageous when it comes to the illegal pet trade. For that reason, researchers keep these locations a closely guarded secret.