Cottage Country is mourning the loss of its oldest turtle.
According to Leora Berman, founder of Turtle Guardians, Grace will be buried with Indigenous customs sometime next year, and they hope to create a memorial garden and statue in her honour. She says a memorial walk will be held on Sept. 29, likely at Haliburton Highlands Secondary School.
Grace, who lived in a wetland near Haliburton Village, was estimated to be 125 years old at minimum. The one-eyed senior reptilian had not been seen in her usual nesting site for two years, and her remains were brought to Turtle Guardians late last month after being found 15 kilometres away.
“At first we weren’t sure it was Grace, but the skull is very obvious [and] we’d received a picture,” says Berman. “When her remains were in, we still were in denial I think. We weren’t quite sure. Then when we measured and saw that all three markers were the same, there was a lot of sadness across the board.”
Berman says the response from the community has been similar– several residents have come by in tears over Grace’s passing, and they’ve fielded calls from people and researchers as far as Australia.
According to Berman, Grace was likely taken far from home trying to find a new hibernation site for the winter, after her nest of more than a century was partially filled in for development. She says turtles look for muddy, shallow wetlands with good insulation to hibernate, and Grace likely froze to death when she couldn’t find a suitable site.
Berman says they’re now calling on the Municipality of Dysart et al to implement environmental protection bylaws that are found in most other municipalities. “Whether or not they want to marry it to a shoreline [protection] bylaw is another story, but the most basic site alteration [environmental protection] zone bylaw is what we’re asking Dysart to do at minimum.”
In January, the organization also started a petition to the Ontario government, asking officials to shore up protections for significant wetlands. “We’re calling on the province to undo the undoing of these controls, to reinstate all those hard-fought environmental controls, because they’re there for a reason,” says Berman.
That petition has garnered more than 126,000 signatures so far. Berman says the provincial government has downgraded the ability to deem wetlands as “significant” and has instead attempted to create new wetlands elsewhere, a process known as “offsetting.”
“It takes thousands, if not millions of years, for some wetlands to establish. So to think you can mimic those homes and those functions, even in a hundred years, is misconceived,” says Berman, noting that around 70 per cent of wildlife and fish in eastern North America call wetlands home. “In 80 per cent of the research on offsetting across the United States, it doesn’t work. Not for wildlife, and often not very well for flood control or water regulation either. There’s a reason wetlands are where they are.”
Given that turtles take 60 years to replace themselves and can lay eggs their entire lives, Berman says it’s all the more important to protect the ones we already have. “The rate at which they replace themselves is so low, and the rate at which we’re losing them is so fast.”
While Grace’s age was officially set at 125-plus years old, Berman says 150 is a likelier minimum. Turtles’ age is estimated based on size, and Berman explains a birth defect that made her shell convex means Grace might have grown slower than normal. “She could have been 300 years old, and we wouldn’t know how to tell.”
“It’s been extremely emotional, because when you’ve worked with these characters, you begin to appreciate how magnificent and sacred and special they are,” says Berman. “How peaceful and generous they are too. It’s just such a loss for this community, the Highlands, the world. She will be greatly missed.”