by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., September 19, 2026, Durham, North Carolina.
I am exhausted, having just returned from Duke Forest, where my students and I were searching for and radio-tracking Eastern Box Turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina). The effort, persistence, and perspiration are worth it: a chance to give back to the Box Turtles that have already given so much to me, an opportunity to reciprocate by working to improve the connectivity and management of their habitat.
Through our study, we are following Box Turtles across Duke Forest and nearby conservation lands, asking how they move through fragmented landscapes and how land management might protect the connections they need.
Yet the Box Turtles continue to give.
The effort of finding them translates into the joy of hours beneath thick oak canopies and along riparian trails, brushing past remnant stone foundations. It means fully experiencing what differentiates mid-September in the Piedmont woods from mid-January or mid-July: the temperature and humidity, the quality of the light, the density of the canopy and spider webs, the hush of the birds.
It means making detailed notes on data sheets and paying careful attention to wood and water, rocks and ridges. It means joining, both similarly and differently, a long lineage of people who have done the same: Indigenous Peoples, naturalists such as Henry David Thoreau, and even Mary, the kind woman I met on the trail today, who graciously shared a Box Turtle poem with me rooted in attention and the power of “no.”
Today, my teammates and I wrote observations such as “turtle closed tight in its shell,” “found in a depression between three berms,” and “in a mixed-hardwood riparian forest along a social trail.” Our notes echo those of Henry David Thoreau, writing 740 miles to the north and 170 years ago:
“In the dry lupine bank pasture, about fifteen rods from the river, apparently travelling up the hill, I see a box tortoise, the first I have found in Concord” (May 17, 1856; Thoreau, 1906a, pp. 339–342).
Like our team, which records each turtle’s sex to better understand the health of the population, Thoreau noted the turtle’s eye color: “bright light red, or rather vermilion, remarkable” (May 17, 1856; Thoreau, 1906a, pp. 339–342). Unlike the turtles we encountered today, his “squeak[ed] much like a croaking frog.”
Thoreau, too, was concerned about human-caused turtle mortality and the effects of transportation routes cutting across the landscape. He recorded a dead turtle found “on the railroad, at Dogwood Swamp” (July 19, 1856; Thoreau, 1906a, pp. 417–418) and others “crushed by a wheel” (July 22, 1860; Thoreau, 1906b, pp. 413–414).
People have been observing Box Turtles closer to home, in North Carolina, for a long time, too. Sometime between 1585 and 1593, John White—artist and governor of the Roanoke Colony—painted a Common Box Turtle viewed from above. The perspective echoes the photographs our team takes from directly above each turtle we find, preserving the patterns of its shell as part of our scientific record.
John Lawson’s 1709 account of his journey through the Carolina Piedmont also describes a “land-terebin,”probably, though not certainly, an Eastern Box Turtle. Lawson reported that Indigenous people ate these turtles and wrote that most were “good Meat.”
His account is filtered through a colonial gaze, its species identification is not definitive, and it gives us no basis for generalizing across Indigenous nations. It also omits important ceremonial relationships with turtles. The Chickasaw Nation, for example, directly documents the use of turtle-shell shakers in traditional stomp dances. James Mooney, working with named Cherokee knowledge keepers, recorded the use of shell rattles by Cherokee women in dances (Mooney, 1891).
Lawson also attributed to the land-terebin a diet of “Snails, Tad-poles, or young Frogs, Mushrooms, and the Dew and Slime of the Earth and Ponds.” The first three remain recognizable as favored Box Turtle foods today.
Human engagement with Eastern Box Turtles is not limited to the centuries-old observations of Indigenous knowledge keepers, European explorers and colonizers, or American naturalists. As Mary shared through poetry today, our observations of and experiences with Box Turtles continue to enter, and enlarge, our literature.
In Mark Doty’s poem “No,” first published in 1993 and later collected in Fire to Fire, a turtle becomes a starting point for considering the relationships between humans and turtles, power and age, wonder and personal agency. Children carry the closed turtle around the dining hall, hoping that he might reveal his “old, old face.” But he remains within the portable shelter of his shell, offering:
“his prayer,
the single word of the shell,
which is no” (Doty, 2008).
Mary shared another poem with me today, one that perhaps names my students and me more truly than “herpetologists,” “ecologists,” or “conservationists.” It honors people who excitedly share mushroom sightings with strangers on a path, who help caterpillars cross the road, and who teach “hope through data” at the seaside.
In “Praise the Positive Deviants,” poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer calls these people bearers of a “contagious, rebel love,”a love that bids us to “live toward the mutual flourishing of all” (Trommer, 2026).
May our study of Box Turtle connectivity be one small expression of that “contagious, rebel love,” where attention might become knowledge, knowledge becomes care, and care becomes corridors through which turtles, and all of us, might continue to move and flourish.
Want to Learn More? Explore the Eastern Box Turtle series, following this remarkable animal through deep time, scientific naming, movement, landscape fragmentation, and individual variation:
Looking into the Box: Individuality and Variation in Eastern Box Turtles
Before the Box: The 260-Million-Year Story of the Eastern Box Turtle
Outside the Box: Range, Roads, and the Future of the Eastern Box Turtle
Drawing the Box: Early Descriptions and Studies of the Eastern Box Turtle
Around the Box: Home Range, Movement, and the Remembered Routes of Eastern Box Turtles
Within the Box: Habitat Mosaics, Moisture, and the Seasonal Lives of Eastern Box Turtles
Beyond the Box: Young Turtles, Interrupted Routes, and the Future of Eastern Box Turtle Landscapes
Wrapped in a Box: The Gifts of the Eastern Box Turtle
Unwrapping the Box: Seeds, Spores, and the Forest Inside the Turtle
Opening the Box: The Eastern Box Turtle and the Forest-Floor Food Web
References
Chickasaw Nation. (n.d.). Shell shakers: Stomp dance rhythm-makers [Video]. Chickasaw.tv. https://www.chickasaw.tv/
Doty, M. (2008). No. In Fire to fire: New and selected poems. HarperCollins.
Lawson, J. (1709). A new voyage to Carolina: Containing the exact description and natural history of that country; together with the present state thereof; and a journal of a thousand miles, travel’d thro’ several nations of Indians. London. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1838
Mooney, J. (1891). The sacred formulas of the Cherokees. In J. W. Powell (Ed.), Seventh annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885–’86 (pp. 301–397). Government Printing Office. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24788
Thoreau, H. D. (1906a). The journal of Henry D. Thoreau (B. Torrey, Ed.; Vol. 8). Houghton Mifflin.
Thoreau, H. D. (1906b). The journal of Henry D. Thoreau (B. Torrey, Ed.; Vol. 13). Houghton Mifflin.
Trommer, R. W. (2026, September 18). Praise the positive deviants. A Hundred Falling Veils. https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2026/09/18/praise-the-positive-deviants/
White, J. (ca. 1585–1593). Common box turtle; seen from above, head to left [Watercolor over graphite]. British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1906-0509-1-68
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