When Geoff Hughes turned 22, the birthday gift he received was better than anything money could buy.
“I was still living back home in Canada at the time, and we were out searching for a local population of wood turtles as part of the first bit of field work for my Honours thesis,” he says.
“Sure enough, I ended up catching my very first wood turtle, who we named Beau.”
His new friend was released back into the wild and Geoff continued on with life as normal, chuffed with his discovery.
Little did he know that eight years later to the day, he and Beau would meet again.
“It was my 30th birthday and it was my first day out in the field for my Masters project, and who was the first turtle I caught? It was Beau, of course.”
Since then, Geoff’s love of turtles has only continued to grow. Now living in Australia, he’s just finished his four-year PhD at UNE into the conservation of the endangered Bell’s turtle - a large freshwater species only found around the New England region of New South Wales.
“Because of their small range and the prevalence of foxes, they’ve been losing a lot of hatchlings for the past however many decades, which means we’ll eventually get to a point where it’s not sustainable.”
“My PhD was a conservation ecology project largely aimed at finding ways to protect them.”
Geoff spent much of his thesis trying to figure out how to stop predators in their tracks- a tricky task, due to the sheer number of foxes inhabiting the area.
“One of my fellow PhD candidates, Louise Streeting, had huge success with incubating eggs in captivity and then releasing the hatchlings when they were old enough, however, I wanted to find a way that eliminated some of the labour and cost involved in that process,” he says.
“Ideally, you’d put in a lot of effort at the start of the nesting season, but then with the right technology, you could sit back and let the equipment do the job of protecting the nests,” he explains.
One of the things he came up with was constructing large wooden ‘nesting refuge boxes’ that would provide a fox-proof enclosure.
“They’re surrounded by chicken wire and the entrance is protected by an electrified fence,” he says.
“The idea was the little turtle could get in and hopefully nest inside where her eggs could be protected from the foxes outside.”
Image: Geoffrey Hughes holding a Bell's turtle caught while out on field work for his PhD project.
Geoff scattered six of these contraptions around local farmland, and observed a handful of females digging nests just outside the boxes, with one eventually venturing inside to dig, although she didn't lay. Despite this potential, the method had to be ruled out.
“The problem with Bell’s turtles is they like to nest very close to the water’s edge,” he says.
“This meant the nest structures could be flooded very easily, making them impractical as a solution.”
Geoff’s not letting the setback dampen his achievements from the past four years, though. With little research being done on the species, any contribution is valuable.
“It’s only been in the past couple of decades that anyone has done any intensive studies on the ecology of Bell’s turtles, so the more we know, the better,” he says.
“Hopefully someone else will be able to take up the torch in the future and use my findings to come up an alternative solution.”
As for the future of our native turtles, Geoff remains hopeful.
“Another aspect of my thesis was seeing if you could tell the difference between turtle egg shells from different species,” he says.
“At the moment there is no way of knowing, however, I took egg shells from around the New England and looked at them under a scanning electron microscope. I found a lot of promising things, and it looks like there are some features that do differ, so I hope someone with more experience in that field can take my research and keep going – it would be great if we could come up with a field guide to egg shells.
“At the moment, if you find an egg in the wild, you can’t assign the data to a particular species, so this would transform future turtle research.”
As for his message to people this World Turtle Day (Monday 23 May), Geoff is encouraging people to keep an eye out when on the roads.
“If it’s safe to do so, pull over somewhere, pick up the turtle, and let it go in a ditch in the direction that it was going,” he says.
“The turtle is on a mission and knows where it’s going, but sometimes they just don’t realise that you need to cross a road quickly. Saving them from the road will help a huge amount in the conservation of our precious native species.”
You can read more about the work UNE’s Animal Behaviour and Ecology Lab is doing to preserve the endangered Bell’s turtle here.
