RUSSELL BURKE (WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST): I’m Russell Burke. I’m a professor in the biology department at Hofstra University and I’ve been interested in wildlife biology for a long time. Our latest project has been working with the terrapins and the raccoons out at Jamaica Bay.

RUSSELL: I’ve been working with turtles and snakes and lizards as far back as I can remember.

RUSSELL: What people found in the early 1980s was that the terrapins here laid eggs and they all hatched without any really serious predation problems at all. And that’s very unusual.

RUSSELL: Turtles all over the place have very serious predation problems and very often in North America, raccoons are the main predator. So, we were drawn to this site in part, because it had such very, very, low predation and it was unusual. So, we were interested in it and wanted to learn more about it and what we found was that the situation changed totally.

RUSSELL: Now, it appeared that predation levels, on the eggs, at least, was pretty close to 100%. So we were interested in knowing what had happened since the early 1980s that caused this change and made it so much more difficult for terrapins to produce eggs that could actually survive to hatch.

MARIA GIAMBIANCO (HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY): My name’s Maria Giambianco and I am out here to do my Master’s research. It’s on diamond-back terrapins. They only come up on land to nest. The terrapins have a very important job in the environment. They eat mollusks and crustaceans so we don’t know if they’re gone, what’s gonna happen…

RUSSELL: We only use the word terrapin for this one species of turtle. The kind that we study here. They live at least as long as we do. Some tortoises live well over 200 years.

RUSSELL: We figure there’s about 2000 nests per year laid right here on this island, which makes it one of the largest nesting areas anywhere, for this species.

JEREMY FEINBERG (HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY): My name’s Jeremy Feinberg. I’m a wildlife biologist and I specialize in herpetology, which is the study of reptiles and amphibians. And to think that it’s right here in New York City, I think is wonderful. And it makes me happy to be working here. I’m working in the place where I live, which I think is important to do. I like just being able to just hop on a subway or drive in a car and get here and do my work.

JEREMY: We started seeing that raccoons were eating every terrapin nest in sight. We were finding areas where it looked like it had snowed, there were so many eggshells on the ground.

RUSSELL: The raccoons will often just walk along a trail or something, where the terrapins have been nesting and they’re sniffing the ground. They do a little bit of digging. They do a little scratching in the dirt here and there.

RUSSELL: Well, we’re trying to gather the information that’s needed to form the basis for suggesting some sort of master plan and what needs to be done. So we’re trying to learn more about the raccoons, so we can figure out what they’re…what might be manipulated with them. Trying to learn more about the terrapins, figure out what might be manipulated with them.

RUSSELL: We’re not really sure how the raccoons got here. There’s a couple of different stories. There’s no question that they could cross by the bridge and some of them were released by animal control people who thought they were doing something good by taking raccoons that were found in the city and taking them out to a wildlife refuge.

RUSSELL: Looks like we got a raccoon.

RUSSELL: So, when we trap the raccoons, there’s a whole series of different things that we do.

RUSSELL: We measure them, to get their length and we take a couple standard measurements just so we can get an idea of what the size distribution in the population is. By putting radio collars on a few raccoons, our goal is to find out where they spend their time.

RUSSELL: And then we let them go and we let them go do what they do.

MARIA: And once you know what you’re looking for, all of a sudden, all these turtles start coming out of the water and I wait for them to come up on to the shore and I follow them around. I have to be careful because otherwise, if you scare ‘em, they go back to the water. I wait for them to nest, and then I catch them and I mark them.

RUSSELL: It’s covered so perfectly, the sand is back in the perfect position. You can’t see the nest.

MARIA: It’s pretty much safe right now, to move them around a little bit, but after about three days, you know, you really have to keep them in the same position.

MARIA: We’re protecting the nests so the raccoons can’t get to the eggs. We’re kind of hoping that they’re not going to even bother.

RUSSELL: We wait ‘til about the time when the hatchlings are expected to emerge and we take the screens off there so the hatchlings can actually come out of the nest. We put a little metal fence around the nest and then we check the nest a couple times of day around the time we expect the hatchlings to come out and we catch the hatchlings when they come out, mark them, and let them back out into the water.

MARIA: Every turtle that we get, we give a special name to, only we don’t use names, we use numbers. So I can tell if I caught the turtle before and I usually take measurements on their size, how old they are.

MARIA: The next thing that we do is we put something called a transponder inside her. It’s like a tiny computer, so anyone who catches her can tell where she came from.

RUSSELL: Well, in the end, what I’d like to see happen here is that we can use the information we gather to do something to help protect the terrapin.

MARIA: If you’re type of person who likes to be outside, if you’re the type of person who likes puzzles, if you’re the type of person who enjoys just seeing how things work, then this is definitely the type of job that you want to get into.

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