Wellfleet Bay’s sea turtle staff is used to getting phone calls or emails about sea turtles. As a member of the federal government’s stranding network for the Greater Atlantic Region, the sanctuary responds to sea turtles that strand year-round, whether the result of cold-stunning or injury, such as vessel strike.

But on September 20th, the turtle team was notified of something they’d never heard before in our region. A Florida man walking on Siasconset Beach on the southeast end of Nantucket saw what he thought looked like sea turtle crawl tracks!

Crawl tracks occur when mature female sea turtles crawl onto sandy beaches to dig their nests and lay eggs in the tropics and subtropics, including Florida. The man alerted the Marine Mammal Alliance Nantucket (MMAN) organization, an all-volunteer group that mainly responds to marine mammal strandings. MMAN sees lots of tracks from seals hauling out to rest on beaches, but these tracks looked different, and there were also what looked like two excavation sites along the tracks.

Confirming the Evidence

Fortunately, the two MMAN members who went to investigate the mystery tracks, Kim Schulam and Peter Meerbergen, are also Wellfleet Bay-trained sea turtle responders. Kim and Peter called the sanctuary which led to many emails, texts, photos, diagrams, and conversations flying around, with nesting experts from NOAA’s Southeast Region weighing in. Ultimately, US Fish and Wildlife Service staff took over the investigation since they have jurisdiction over sea turtle nesting. The consensus from nesting experts was that the tracks were indeed made by a sea turtle that may have attempted to nest. Even more surprising was that the experts said it was a Green sea turtle due to the distinctive pattern of the crawl marks in the sand (see first photo, above).

An Unexpected Species

“Whoa! A Green?” was the initial reaction from Wellfleet Bay’s Sea Turtle Research Coordinator Karen Dourdeville. Karen manages the sanctuary’s 20-year-old sea turtle sightings database which records all sea turtle sightings reported by recreational and commercial vessel operators and anyone else who spots a sea turtle in our waters.

“We know that juvenile Greens occur here due to an occasional summer sighting and a small number of juvenile Greens strand during the cold-stun period in the fall,” Karen  notes. “We do sometimes see mature loggerheads, but we’ve never had a credible sighting of a mature Green sea turtle,” she says.

 Was it a Nest?

The US Fish & Wildlife Service authorized MassWildlife to send an agent to excavate the two dig sites along the nest crawl tracks. But– there were no eggs.

So-called “false crawls” are not unusual on true sea turtle nesting beaches. But what happened on Nantucket is the northernmost record of a sea turtle nesting attempt in the western North Atlantic. Outlier nests do occur, and this is certainly one. While there won’t be any baby Green sea turtles hatching on Nantucket from this event, it does serve as a cautionary reminder that climate change is moving sea turtle activity northward.

This post was contributed by Wellfleet Bay Sea Turtle Research Coordinator Karen Dourdeville.

It’s hot, it’s muggy, the sun is relentless, and our trail naturalist team has decided to greet visitors on the shady Silver Spring trail.

Volunteers Irwin Schorr, Judy Hadley, and I set out at 9:30, supplied with water, snacks, a radio, cell phones, notebooks, binoculars, and my camera. As always, our hope is to find the familiar and the unexpected and have the chance to interact with visitors who have chosen to visit Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

As a team of naturalists, the three of us are perfectly suited. There’s Irwin, who tells the stories of the plants (every plant has a story) and who knows pharmaceuticals and the role plants play in our health (including the whole story of aspirin!)  Judy, who’s new to the team, loves plants, especially trees. Her favorite season for “tree-walking” is late fall through early spring “just because of the sheer beauty of the tree skeletons.” I’m a retired professor of French/Applied Linguistics with no scientific background! However, I aspire to know as much as possible about botany, have learned much about insects and birds, love doing research, and take many pictures to document our observations.

Every day on the trail has its highlights and surprises. Sometimes it’s a diminutive dragonfly like the Eastern Amberwing on a Spatterdock, aka Yellow Pond Lily (Nuphar variegatum).

Other times it’s the highly-anticipated emergence of the scarlet blossoms of the Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis) and even the unusual white or pink forms. While relatively rare, at least according to the books, we seem to find these “albinos” regularly on Silver Spring. But discovering it for the first time was exciting!

And we’re still left speechless when a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird just happens to stop by for a snack.

As we walk, we watch, we listen, we stop, we puzzle over plants, we learn and, most importantly, we talk to visitors and answer their questions. Here are a few answers for some of the many questions we got this summer:

Yes, these are Painted Turtles! They sun themselves to warm up and to maintain overall good health.

We thought this looked like Pac-Man devouring a Blue Dasher (dragonfly)! “Who is Pac-Man?” a 5-year-old asked us. Actually, it’s a Fragrant White Water Lily pad with the dragonfly in the right place at the right time.

What’s the stuff that looks like spaghetti? It’s Common Dodder, a parasitic plant that attaches itself to the stems of other plants and draws nutrients from them (known as a stem holoparasite). Unchecked, it can choke out other plants. We didn’t used to have as much of it here because it doesn’t usually thrive in colder climates. But with climate change, Common Dodder has become more abundant.

What’s that fragrance? Yes, that’s the Sweet Pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia). Breathe in deeply and savor the aroma! Look at the buds and the leaves and the individual flowers on the long stem (also known as a raceme).

Silver Spring, like every trail at Wellfleet Bay, usually has a few surprises if you stop, look, listen, smell, and sometimes walk silently.

I think what also makes Judy, Irwin, and me a good team is that we share a sense of wonder. No matter how often we’ve seen a flower, it’s always exciting to see it emerge again. Being a naturalist on the trails is one of the best learning experiences through which we have all gained a much deeper understanding our environment. And, more than anything, we love being out in nature and being astonished by it.

This post was contributed by Jeannette Bragger, a veteran volunteer naturalist and Piping Plover nesting season monitor. If you’re interested in joining our volunteer naturalists program, please contact Visitor Experience and Outreach Coordinator Christine Bates.

The Spring 2022 banding season was a study in extremes. It began with a combination of mid-April storms to the south, pushing migrating Hermit Thrushes, Golden and Ruby-crowned Kinglets north, and a fog bank forcing them to land on Cape Cod—a phenomenon known as a fall-out. As a result, we banded a record number of these three species. They were accompanied by large numbers of Northern Flickers, which did not turn up in our nets, but were documented during our daily census. Unfortunately, dozens of exhausted Northern Flickers washed up on bayside beaches.

During this period we noted an impact on bird condition. All three species captured during this initial fallout had a 10% lower body mass. Average mass increased as the season progressed (see the table below). In Ruby-crowned Kinglets (RCKI) we saw the same pattern, but it was even more magnified since males arrive before the females. Ruby-crowned Kinglet males were caught up in the April 14-15th weather event, but the females, who arrive later, were less impacted. And our data show female RCKI being at above-average in weight, but males below. If we consider the Golden-crowned Kinglets you can see how the later birds weighed more than the earlier birds. But because the later birds were more likely to be smaller females, the weight difference is even more extreme.

After the first three busy days, the station slowed to a normal capture rate through the end of April and into the first week of May. But then weather impacted our operations again. An extreme wind storm (May 7-10) was followed by four days of fog. This impacted us in several ways: we couldn’t band in the wind (birds can see the nets blowing) and birds tend not to migrate toward the Cape in northeast winds anyway. Fog also keeps local birds from moving around. Meanwhile, it was 80 degrees in Montreal, so migration didn’t stop; the birds just missed the northeast coast completely.

Additional evidence of the dearth of birds during this period of May can be seen in our total lack of male Black-throated Blue Warblers. These birds migrated during the week of bad weather and completely bypassed Cape Cod.

But things got better. When the fog finally lifted, we had our best week of the season from May 16-19. We captured 20-plus catbirds a day as all the second-year birds moved through. From May 20-22 we encountered our only big wave of warblers of the spring, with 11 species captured over the three-day stretch.

After May 22^nd things slowed down as the migration season drew to a close. But we had some nice late season surprises, the best being an older male Blue Grosbeak. This bird showed up one day but wasn’t captured. It disappeared the next day and we thought it was gone. But to our surprise, it appeared in one of our nets the following day and we all got to enjoy it. What a stunning bird, with the interplay of the chestnut wing bars on the blue plumage—a beauty!

Although we had lots of slow stretches this spring and missed one portion of migration completely, we still managed to record our highest spring banding total ever with 758 birds –twenty more than in 2021, our previous best year. The burst of birds in April and one good week in May really kept the numbers up and we look forward to looking for more specific patterns once we fully analyze the data.

This post was contributed by master bander James Junda who operates Wellfleet Bay’s bird banding station.

This winter we were excited to discover Eastern Screech Owls roosting in a nest box installed in a wooded area not far from the Discovery Center.

Although lots of people put up boxes for screech owls, it can take months or years before the owls find them, and often squirrels or mice find them first. In the case of our nest box, it had previously been occupied by a Northern Saw-whet Owl, breeding Wood Ducks, and even a honey bee colony!

Inspired by our recent screech owl activity, plans were made to try to attract a far less common species to the sanctuary—the Barn Owl.

Barn Owls are pretty rare in Massachusetts. They’re listed as a Species as Special Concern, mostly because of the loss of farms and open fields. Their known breeding range is generally limited to the Vineyard and Nantucket. Last year a pair of Barn Owls in Yarmouth lost their nest when a barn’s roof collapsed. One of two owlets survived and was released last September after undergoing three months of rehabilitation at Cape Wildlife Center.

It’s our hope that the new nest box  at Long Pasture will draw any Barn Owls that may be scouting out a new nest site or looking for a roosting space next winter.

Putting up a free-standing nest box isn’t complicated, but it does require many helping hands. Our Barn Owl box was built and painted by Long Pasture volunteers Rick Hamel, Lee Hawkins, Mike Poissant, Jeff Keffer, David Winther, and John Richtarik. It was installed with the assistance of students from Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School in Bourne, who helped lug the hefty box and its three 20-foot-long posts across an open field. Then, very carefully, they raised it.

Once the owl box was raised and secured, metal flashing was applied to each post to deter climbing predators, like raccoons.

We also applied flashing to the tree where our screech owl box is located after the game camera caught this photo last fall.

We hope Long Pasture visitors will keep an eye on the Barn Owl box. As we’ve learned, you never know who’s going to move in!

The 2021 field season for monitoring and studying the sanctuary’s Eastern Box Turtle population has drawn to a close and it was a pretty exciting one! Our headstarted turtles continued to grow and we found more turtles we hadn’t seen before. We also recorded our first instance of flesh-eating flies.

Our headstarted box turtles, now four years old, put on some weight and really extended their range on the property as they began to explore and develop their own home territories. As is the case with young turtles, they are very good at staying hidden. Even with the radio transmitters attached to their shells, they can be difficult to locate.

One headstart turtle in particular (seen below) moved from Eastman’s Field and over to Goose Pond and then back. She ended up brumating (hibernation for reptiles) last October in nearly the same place as she did in 2020. This is also common for box turtles, which frequently exhibit brumation site fidelity.

On a sad note, one of our headstarts died in brumation in its first winter. The cause remains a mystery. The digital temperature monitor placed into her brumation burrow to record the winter soil temperatures did not indicate that she was exposed to freezing temps in the burrow and her weight was good when she entered brumation. We don’t clearly understand the survivability of young turtles and particularly those that die during brumation. This is one of the box turtle mysteries we’d like to unlock.

One of the indicators of a healthy turtle population is juvenile recruitment, that is, the addition of new turtles to the population. At Wellfleet Bay we sometimes find young box turtles and adults that we have never recorded before.  This is good because new turtles can provide some genetic diversity. This year we found a higher than usual number of new turtles.  It’s possible in some cases they are just passing through and we’ll never see them again. But some of the young turtles we’ve discovered in past years are seen every year now and someday, we hope, will help keep our population stable.

Something we haven’t seen at the sanctuary before—signs of flesh-eating flies. Box turtles can sometimes become infected with them. Late this season one turtle exhibited an exit hole from a sarcophagid or flesh-eating fly larvae. These flies, of which there are numerous species, use the box turtle (or other organism) as a host for their larvae to eat and develop within.  This process is called “cutaneous myiasis” and it’s a natural one. Small localized infestations on a turtle are typically not an issue for a healthy animal, but more severe infestations can be serious. Are the flies just now coming to Wellfleet or have they always been here and we just missed them? We’ll pay close attention this question this coming summer.

We reviewed the turtle found with myiasis with a reptile veterinarian and, happily, we determined that no larvae were present within the turtle. The larvae had completed that stage of their life cycle and left the host, so no medical intervention was required.

What’s on tap for box turtle monitoring in 2022? The continuation of our decades-old mark/recapture studies, the monitoring of our headstarts and, we hope, the creation of a searchable box turtle data base for the sanctuary. One thing is certain–there is always plenty of work to do!

The following post was contributed by volunteer Tim O’Brien, a box turtle researcher. Tim, along with his wife Kim Novino, are also active sea turtle volunteers.

This is the time of year when our collective attention turns to gifts. So for this seasonal message I’d like to unwrap the meaning of gift and offer those that come “without ribbons. [That come] without tags…without packages, boxes or bags.”

Look up the word gift in the Merriam Webster dictionary and the first definition provided is “noun: a notable capacity, talent, or endowment.”

The past year was filled with countless illustrations of notable talent and skill demonstrated by Mass Audubon Cape Cod staff and volunteers. It is these gifts that are at the heart of our region’s success and accomplishments. Presented here are some shining examples from the past year:

January: Meticulously recording and finalizing data for the 2020 cold-stunned season to officially reveal that it was the second largest number of cold-stunned sea turtle strandings on record (1000-plus!)

February: Navigating the nuances and frenzy of open enrollment for Summer Day Camp and early registration for local families which increased opportunities for Cape kids to attend camp at a discounted rate.

March: Learning a new technological platform to deliver the 25^th Cape Cod Natural History Conference online so local research—spanning the subjects of microplastics in seals to nesting Bald Eagles on Cape Cod—could be shared with over 250 registrants.

April: Tapping into professional know-how of engaging children creatively in the outdoors while simultaneously meeting COVID safety protocols so we could run April Vacation Adventures and get “back outside actually TOUCHING real-life nature again with all our kiddos!”

May: Focusing tirelessly (for way more than 24-hours!) on Bird-a-thon, building both awareness of and a community of enthusiastic birders which resulted in record-breaking fundraising for our region’s bird conservation and education programs.

June: Lending a helping hand to herptiles (reptiles and amphibians) was an exciting theme this month: the first-ever documented breeding of trans-located spadefoot toads in Massachusetts occurred in a vernal pool that we created at Ashumet Holly Wildlife Sanctuary; the surprise discovery, and subsequent rescue, of a tiny ring-necked snake discovered at the ocean’s edge during a Field School walk in Truro; and the identification and protection of over 400 terrapin nests in five sites in three towns (Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans) monitored by 160 volunteers and three staff yielded 5,000 terrapin hatchlings—that is 1,000 more baby turtles than last year!

July: Realizing record-breaking visitation at Wellfleet Bay with over 8,300 people counted at the admissions desk (more than 1,500 than previous record), and realizing how vital time spent outside in nature is to so many people, and how important our welcoming sanctuaries are in the grand scheme of things.

August: Logging in countless hours of labor cleaning the buildings, managing rubbish and recycling, mowing fields, and maintaining trails to make our sanctuaries inviting and safe for record-breaking visitation!

September: Orchestrating a magical celebration and ribbon-cutting for the Discovery Center’s opening at Long Pasture that brought friends, colleagues and supporters together for our first in-person event in a very long time.

October: Wielding chainsaws for days to tackle fallen trees—oaks, cherries, cedars, and pines—toppled by a powerful nor’easter that ripped through Massachusetts and affected all of our sanctuaries on the Cape with blocked trails and power outages.

November: Enjoying the return of schoolchildren and college groups for in-person programming at the sanctuaries including students from Monomoy Regional Middle School studying bird migration and undergrads from Penn State’s Adventure Literature program.

December: Managing scores of media inquiries and visits from reporters and documentary filmmakers all interested in capturing video and stories about cold-stunned sea turtle rescue, and raising international awareness of our important work as first-responders in this impactful conservation program!

Now as January approaches, staff will begin to get together to plan another exciting year of educational programs for all ages and audiences, summer camp, preschool, wildlife science and monitoring, ecological management, campground reservations, volunteer training, and much, much more.

I am incredibly proud of being part of such a talented and dedicated group of people—a true gift and source of endless pride. Happy New Year!

This post was contributed by Melissa Lowe, Regional Director of Mass Audubon Cape Cod.

Every cold-stun sea turtle season has its special characteristics and this year’s will be known for how long it lasted— well into January!

As of this posting, we’ve rescued or recovered over 700 sea turtles, our fourth busiest year. Last year we had over 1,000 by the end of the season. But now that we’re about half-way through January, it’s clear the season is finally wrapping up.

Because of a very warm fall, the first cold-stunned turtles came in about two weeks later than usual, November 17th. After that, they came in almost daily, including one 94-turtle day.

One noteworthy turtle was a live Kemp’s ridley with a balloon string running through its entire GI tract. We’ve only seen this situation in two turtles from previous years and both were dead. We’re looking forward to hearing more about the latest turtle and our fingers are crossed for its full recovery.

Two stranded turtles have had tags, meaning both were previous cold-stun victims. A green sea turtle found on Nantucket, unfortunately, was dead. The turtle was rehabbed last winter and released in June at West Dennis Beach. We also had a return ridley, a turtle that stranded last fall and was rehabbed and released off North Carolina last spring. Happily, it was alive when it was rescued by Michael Lach at Ellis Landing in Brewster!

Our awesome corps of volunteers covered miles of beaches from Dennis to Provincetown, many of them walking on some cold, windy overnight and predawn beach patrols.

Wellfleet—and Great Island in particular–was a stranding hot spot. This 3-mile-long barrier beach in Wellfleet requires almost daily coverage and a round-trip walk of 6 miles! We’re constantly amazed by the “regular crew”—Bruce Hurter, Bruce Beane, Charlie Sullivan and John Cumbler, all of whom walk that long, often lonely trip. We’re also grateful that the Cape Cod National Seashore rangers frequently patroled that stretch by truck, often giving our turtles a lift and bringing them to the sanctuary.

A shout-out, too, to the volunteers who were ready to drive turtles to the New England Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital in Quincy and the National Marine Life Center in Buzzards Bay, sometimes with only a hour’s notice!

We also want to acknowledge all the casual beach walkers who kept an eye out for stranded sea turtles, folks walking their dogs and those visiting the Cape for a weekend, including this familiar-looking guy who responded to a stranded ridley at Ryder Beach in Truro!

The season concluded, as it usually does, with loggerheads. To our amazement, several of these larger turtles were still alive when they stranded, despite being exposed to much colder January temperatures. In one case, our sea turtle team was directed to administer preliminary first aid by “swimming” two loggerheads so that they could start to warm up a bit and re-hydrate. The New England Aquarium’s Sarah DiCarlo, on the phone, gave instructions as our staff oversaw activity in the baby pools!

2021 Sea Turtle Stats