Tag: Turtle Conservation
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Box Turtles and “Rebel Love”
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…
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Opening the Box: The Eastern Box Turtle and the Forest-Floor Food Web
by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., May 31, 2026 In the last post, we unwrapped one of the Eastern Box Turtle’s clearest gifts: the seeds and spores it carries through the landscape. We followed Mayapple seeds and fungal spores through the turtle’s body and back into the forest floor. But the story does not end there.…
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Wrapped in a Box: The Gifts of the Eastern Box Turtle
by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., May 25, 2026 In the previous posts in this Eastern Box Turtle series, we followed the turtle from deep evolutionary time into the present: through its ancient shell, its contested names, its once broad but now shrinking range, its remembered routes, its habitat mosaics, and the broken landscapes that threaten…
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Beyond the Box: Young Turtles, Interrupted Routes, and the Future of Eastern Box Turtle Landscapes
Eastern Box Turtles can persist for decades in changing landscapes, even as the conditions needed for their future quietly disappear. In this post, I explore what the scientific literature reveals about young turtles, population declines, skewed sex ratios, fragmented habitats, roads, mowing, and management. The story is sobering, but clear: conserving box turtles means protecting…
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Within the Box: Habitat Mosaics, Moisture, and the Seasonal Lives of Eastern Box Turtles
Eastern Box Turtles are often described as woodland turtles, but the scientific literature reveals a more complex story. In this post, I explore how Eastern, or Woodland, Box Turtles use habitat mosaics of forest, wetland, edge, leaf litter, logs, brambles, moisture, shade, and overwintering sites. Their home is not a single habitat type, but a…
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Around the Box: Home Range, Movement, and the Remembered Routes of Eastern Box Turtles
by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., May 20, 2026 In the last post, I explored the early Western scientific descriptions of the Eastern, or Woodland, Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina): a turtle that early naturalists struggled to name, classify, and even describe, but repeatedly recognized for its most remarkable feature: the ability to close itself away…
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