>[Turtle 962]
>The FARM requires…
>T - 5:23
wot's this?
https://www.dailypress.com/news/environment/dp-nw-nw-yorktown-natural-resources-20210524-bmxheioh55ge3maiyikqpubmne-story.html
The search for Spotted Turtle 962 took biologist John Mayersky through a stand of large old loblolly pine, oaks and beech to the edge of a pond on Yorktown Naval Weapons Station.
He paused, swinging his 2-foot-long antenna this way and that, before hearing the strongest signal from the tiny transmitter on 962′s shell. It was coming from the deepest black water of the pond, beyond a thick bed of reeds.
“She probably heard us coming, and scooted in,” he said. And then, holding the antenna high, he pushed through the reeds and into the center of the pond.
He and colleague Robert Hamilton make twice weekly checks on tagged turtles at the base, as part of a continuous effort to maintain the inventory of its natural resources.
That inventory — contained in a 3-inch-thick loose-leaf binder — is the heart of a management plan that earned Yorktown the 2021 Secretary of the Navy Environmental Award for Natural Resources Conservation.
The plan covers some 7,200 acres of forest, which with the nearby woods of Camp Peary and Newport News Waterworks probably comprises the largest stretch of undeveloped forest in Tidewater Virginia, said Tom Olexa, the weapons station’s natural resources manager.
His job is to manage the base’s woodlands along with some 2,600 acres of wetlands and 37 miles of shoreline in way that doesn’t interfere with the military mission — and that protects spotted turtles as well as plants and animals that are less threatened.
But the environmental mission extends beyond the weapons station’s lands, he said.
That’s why the answer to one military mission issue, preventing the shoreline erosion that could affect the base’s Pier R3 where warships load ordnance, is taking the shape it has.
Much of the shore on either side of the pier belongs to the National Park Service. York County, meanwhile, was concerned about the rapid erosion of Penniman Spit, off the Navy’s Cheatham Annex property that is part of Olexa’s responsibility.
And, thanks connections forged with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, whose students and staff regularly use the base for their research, as well as regular conversations with the federal and state agencies in the Chesapeake Bay Program, Olexa knew that living shorelines were an option — hardened shorelines farther upstream, in fact, were a big reason for the faster pace of erosion along the Navy’s and National Park Service’s shorelines.
He also knew the state and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation made oyster restoration a priority on the York River.
“Partnerships are key,” he said.
Listening to all those partners, the answer to the military challenge of protecting the pier seemed clear to Olexa: oyster reefs. Design is already underway.
In addition to stabilizing the shore, by blunting the impact of waves, oysters filter pollutants out of the water. Since the pier is a restricted area, the oysters can’t be harvested — but they can release their spat to grow into oysters farther downstream.
“We’ll be doing something for the whole community, for the York River and the bay,” Olexa said. “We’ll be doing something for commercial fishing, too.”
The military mission is why the base sold recently a stand of 40-year-old pine trees. The station needed to clear trees that threatened to interfere with plans for increased helicopter operations.
To make the deal financially viable for the loggers, the weapons station had to sell more trees than were strictly needed for the clear zone — and so earlier this year, the weapons station planted hundreds of eight-inch-tall loblolly pine seedlings on some of the cleared land. They’re already 2 feet tall.
And the base did not allow the loggers to cut the loblollies at one end of the clearing — they’re next to a wetland that’s home to salamanders, frogs and, Olexa thinks, some spotted turtles.
The spotted turtles eat frogs and salamanders. They need clear, clean water, preferably without fish that also hunt those amphibians.
“This is prime time for them, they just really shovel it in in the spring,” said Hamilton.
The weapons station, with its vernal ponds — pools that wax and wane with the seasons — as well as its more permanent sinkhole ponds, is ideal country for the turtles.
The turtles will travel hundreds of yards from one pond to another — figuring out the paths they travel and times they move it is a big part of what Hamilton and Mayersky are trying to figure out.
“She’s really moving around in here,” Mayersky called out, standing in thigh deep water, within a yard or two of Turtle 962.
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