The Peterborough Examiner e-edition

Bursting at seams with turtles

Ontario Turtle Conservation Centre preparing to move to larger site on Television Road next year

MATTHEW P. BARKER

The Ontario Turtle Conservation Centre is getting a new home next year to help deal with the increasing numbers of turtles injured, mainly from incidents with vehicles on roadways.

Dr. Sue Carstairs, executive and medical director of the facility, is excited to be able to move out of its current Chemong Road location just north of the city and into the new location at 2785 Television Rd.

The new facility is about 10,000 square feet, an improvement over the current 4,000square-foot location, which Carstairs said is crammed with containers housing injured turtles.

The facility will occupy preexisting buildings on a 100-acre piece of land owned by siblings Gerry and Mary Young.

Education is the biggest part of what Carstairs and her team want to emphasize throughout this journey.

“Our education programming is extremely popular,” she said. “We would love to get more people involved, because we feel education is the key to conservation.”

The new buildings will offer more space for the turtles and staff and allow for them both to coexist more comfortably.

The new location will have many new or expanded features, including more space for educational purposes, both indoor and outdoor turtle

enclosures and displays for educational purposes.

The future facility will have a much larger area for people to observe surgeries and procedures done to help the turtles.

“There will be a glass partition where visitors can see what is going on,” Carstairs said.

“We do have a glass-enclosed surgery (at Chemong location), but it literally only holds maybe three visitors at a time, this would allow large groups.”

Carstairs said the conservation centre is also partnering with Curve Lake First Nation to add an Indigenous aspect to the education for visitors.

“We started by introducing that a bit into our programming, we have a new brochure, so this will take it beyond that because they have offered to help advise us and work alongside us,” she said.

Requests are constantly coming from other rehabilitation centres across Ontario looking to learn from Carstairs and her staff.

“We have to stagger it so much because our place is so small, so we would really be able to grow that and teach others to do what we do,” she said.

By offering outside rehabilitation centres to learn it will allow for more growth and broaden the scope and impact the conservation centre has on the turtle population.

Classed as a charity, the centre depends on donations and grants and help from volunteers, including students from veterinary post-secondary programs throughout Ontario, to do the work of saving turtles brought to them each year.

“We have veterinary placements and veterinary technician placement students that work with us in the hospital, but again we are limited in space,” she said.

With close to 1,500 turtles brought to Carstairs at the conservation centre each year, the facility also hatches between 5,000 to 6,000 turtles each year.

But because of the small space, Carstairs said, most of the hatchlings are released into the wild right after hatching.

“We can only keep a certain number of the hatchlings that we hatch because we do not have space for them all,” she said. “If we keep them over the winter, it increases their survival quite a bit.”

Carstairs said the larger space will not only improve the care given to the turtles but give visitors a better experience, too.

“The turtles are cared for meticulously; this would just allow for more of them and for enrichment of the human side to take better care of them,” she said.

Donations can be made at ontarioturtle.ca

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2021-05-08T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-08T07:00:00.0000000Z

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