Baby turtles released to the wild!
Baby Blanding’s turtle ready for release.
Earlier this week, we released a new cohort of young Blanding’s turtles into the soon-to-be Rouge National Urban Park. This is part of our Urban Turtle Initiative project; to headstart Blanding’s turtles as part of a conservation program to repopulate the dwindling numbers of this species in the Rouge. Parks Canada, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and the University of Toronto Scarborough are joint partners with the Toronto Zoo on this project. This is the third year we have released these turtles into the park. We are now well underway with radiotracking a subset of these released turtles in order to continue to monitor the success of our conservation program. This program is vital to the recovery of this nationally and provincially threatened species.
For more information about this program and this week’s turtle release, you can check out this article from the Toronto Star: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/06/21/36-blandings-turtles-released-into-rouge-national-urban-park.html
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Funding and Support for Adopt-A-Pond Has Been Provided By:
For more information about Toronto Zoo’s conservation programs, visit:
http://www.torontozoo.com/conservation/ and http://www.torontozoo.com/FightingExtinction/
