News : Turtles and Runways

A Blanding's turtle found to be living at the airport

The underside of a Blanding's turtle

A threatened species, the Blanding's turtles have arrived at the Vinton Veteran's Memorial Airport. No, it's not a petting zoo, and they didn't arrive here via a flight. They inched themselves there all by themselves.

Whenever anything is done at the airport the FAA and the Iowa DNR want to know what's happening on the land. So every inch of the property is inspected to make sure that some rare animal or species isn't on the premises.

Last summer, in June of 2021, the company they hired found one lone turtle. A mama turtle was simply trying to cross the runway to get to some rare grasses that grow on the property. They discovered that A) she was pregnant and full of eggs, B) that she was heading to the nesting area and C) that after watching her for 45 minutes she only moved a few feet.

Normally, they'd track the turtle with a radio transmitter, but that would require an overnight stay at the turtle hotel. Since the very pregnant mama was trying to get to her nesting area the team observing her thought it was best to just let her get on with being a pregnant turtle trying to nest.

The Blanding's turtles have a dark-colored upper shell with yellow dots and stripes. The top of the head is also dark with yellow markings. The markings on the shell and top of the head may fade with age, but the lower jaw and throat will always be a solid yellow color, which makes this species easy to identify. The bottom shell is yellowish in color, with dark smudges on the outer edges of the scales.

Just in case there might be more, the company out of Independence whose job it is to find out if there are more of the Blanding's turtles, checked along the fence line south of the airport. They had to see if perhaps any turtles may have escaped in that direction. It was noted in their report that there was a chicken wire there that in a couple of places turtles may have made a run for it.

The company installed 2 semi-circle sections of drift fence at each area where the turtles might breach the property line. What is a drift fence? In this case, it is 18" of window screen that is buried 6 inches in the ground, and the remaining 12 inches is staked upright. Then the company installed 5-gallon pitfall traps every 20 feet along both sections of the drift fence.

For a week in June of last year, the company kept an eye on the traps. They caught two painted turtles, a red-sided garter snake, and two meadow voles, but not a single Blanding's Turtle was found along the fence.

So after all of that work, the report concluded that there was only one soon-to-be mama turtle.

But hey, now the FFA and the DNR and sleep easy knowing that the airport isn't going to wipe out Iowa's Blanding's Turtle population.

Congratulations to the mama Blanding's turtle. I assume she's now chasing around those baby turtles, as fast as mama turtles can chase...