{"id":19299,"date":"2025-07-24T00:56:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T00:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/19299\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T00:56:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T00:56:13","slug":"this-can-be-deadly-time-for-one-of-canadas-most-endangered-wildlife-groups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/19299\/","title":{"rendered":"This can be deadly time for one of Canada’s ‘most endangered’ wildlife groups"},"content":{"rendered":"

Road mortality is high<\/p>\n

While there are numerous reasons for the decline of turtles, road mortality is one of the major threats. It is the No. 1 concern from late May to July as this is the time period when female turtles leave waterways to look for places to lay their eggs on land, often forcing them to cross roads to do so.<\/p>\n

Because of that, the CWF is encouraging people to report observations of turtles (alive or dead) on roads to iNaturalist<\/a>. Roads are a main threat to many species of turtle, and knowing where they cross them can help plan where mitigation should be placed, CWF said.<\/p>\n

When turtles look for nesting sites, they will have particular habitat features they’re looking for, Seburn said. In general, they want to leave the wetland, river or lake and move a certain distance from the water. Sometimes it’s very close, 10 or 20 metres from the water, but, in other cases, it might be 100 or 200 metres away from it.<\/p>\n

“Once they found an area they think is interesting, in general, they want a few important aspects, one of which is the full sun, so that way the ground will get the warmth, and the eggs in the ground will warm up, [with] not too much vegetation growing on the ground,” said Seburn.<\/p>\n

Turtles will avoid making nests in vegetative landscapes such as residential lawns because the grass makes it hard to dig, he said. So, they often opt for sandy beaches and soft surfaces that lack plants growing on or around them.<\/p>\n

In “our modern age,” one of the habitat features that adequately meets the turtles’ needs for nesting are road shoulders, Seburn added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Road mortality is high While there are numerous reasons for the decline of turtles, road mortality is one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-19299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}