We documented 29 depredated terrapin nests at the Fairfield County hotspot during our survey this week. At least two terrapins were struck and killed by vehicles here since last week's survey. One intact carcass was found, in addition to scattered partial remains along the road. It was quite a gruesome scene. We also observed one female terrapin actively nesting along the side of the road. There is likely a large terrapin population here. Some key questions are: how large is this population? is it increasing, stable, or decreasing? and what percentage of breeding adult turtles are being killed by vehicles each year? These are difficult questions to answer, and would require intensive population sampling, which has not been done for terrapins in Connecticut. Regardless of the overall influence of road mortality on the terrapin population here, it is still worthwhile to do whatever can be reasonably be done to reduce the number of vehicle strikes on terrapins here. It was apparent that one of the dead turtles we found this week had crawled some distance with a cracked shell. It seemed she crawled along the road until reaching a storm drain, where she died after not wanting to walk across it, and being unable to get up over the curb and back into the marsh. Other terrapins are swiftly and completely obliterated upon being stuck by speeding vehicles here. We document all of this, but are refraining to share these gory photos at this time. The nesting terrapin can be seen in the photo below, above a littered Dunkin' Donuts cup. We didn't get any closer so she could continue nesting undisturbed. At first I didn't know if this turtle was alive because I could only see parts of the shell through the vegetation. There's also a photo of a depredated nest with some of the eggs still intact. Perhaps something (probably vehicle traffic) caused the predator to leave before eating all the eggs. We gently replaced and reburied these, but this was probably a futile effort depending on how long they were exposed.
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