"The work is part of a growing movement of scientists starting with habitat conservation"
"If I wanted to find a bog turtle, I would need to bring two things: muck boots and patience. “And not necessarily in that order,” said Brian Parr over the phone. The natural resource specialist with the Nature Conservancy in Asheville, North Carolina, was managing my expectations before I visited him in the northwest corner of the state. Amid the vast forests carpeting the corrugated slopes of the Appalachians sit some of the country’s only remaining mountain bogs and a rare, threatened species of turtle living in them.
For slogging through knee-deep mud in search of an animal no larger than a softball, the boots made sense. The patience, well, that worried me. I had assumed that bog turtles were slow-moving and therefore easy to find. Parr snort-laughed at this. Even experts can have a hard time locating the turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii, in the few remaining Appalachian habitats where it’s holding on—despite its Day-Glo orange neck. The reptile’s short, muscular limbs easily propel it through a landscape that proves far more challenging to humans: mud festooned with sedges that poke the skin of the unwary with their prickly seedpods and half-buried tree limbs waiting to trip traversers.
For more than 200 years, farmers have ditched and drained what seemed like swampy hellscapes, not investing in their potential as riparian refugia and buffers for floods or as carbon sequesterers and nutrient recyclers. There were once about 5,000 acres of bog habitat in North Carolina, but today there are roughly 500. Over the past century, the numbers of bog turtles and other rare species that call these mountain bogs home have plummeted with them, including the small, white-flowered bunched arrowhead and the endangered carnivorous mountain sweet pitcher plant. Researchers in North Carolina have found fewer than 100 bog turtle populations across the state. In addition to loss of habitat, the turtles also face poachers who seek to sell the imperiled animals on the black market."
Carrie Arnold reports for Sierra magazine with photos by Jamie Wick March 26, 2025.
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