A mysterious phenomenon has been occurring on Riverwatch Parkway over the past year as scores of turtles have been getting run over while attempting to cross the concrete divided highway.
Zoya Kurago, who uses Riverwatch for her daily commute, says she began noticing the turtles last July when making her way home.
Curious, Kurago began taking photos and would come back to the area on Saturdays, when traffic is lighter, to try and rescue the turtles that made their way to the dividing wall without being hit.
However, over the past year, the turtles kept coming.
Kurago says that she notified the city about the turtles but didn’t receive a satisfactory response, so instead she turned to Augusta University.
“I was referred to Dr. Donna Wear who is a herpetologist at AU, and she brought her team of students down there,” Kurago said.
According to Wear, her team identified the different species which include cooters, eastern mud and snapping turtles; some of the turtles were adults, but most were juveniles that had not reached sexual maturity.
“It’s mystifying. Adult turtles will migrate to find a mate, but juveniles usually stay in the same place until they mature,” Wear said.
A hypothesis began to form that the turtles had accidentally been transported from Lake Olmstead and Lake Warren during the dredging operations last year.
According to Wear, turtles have something of a “homing beacon,” and if transplanted, the critters will attempt to find their way back to their original habitat.
“We have relocated turtles in the past, and they have to be penned in for an entire year. Otherwise, they will go right back to where they came from,” Wear said.
William Coughlin, president of Gator Dredging, the company that completed the dredging on lakes Warren and Olmstead, says the probability of the turtles being transported through the dredging pipes is virtually nil.
“We bore six feet down into the silt which is far below where the turtles live, so while it is not impossible that it could happen where a turtle could get trapped in the pipe, it is highly unlikely. It certainly doesn’t happen on a large scale,” Coughlin said.
According to Coughlin, the dredging equipment is loud and vibrates the water. The vibration alone is enough to scare away wildlife. Also, it took over a year to completely dredge both lakes because the equipment moves at a snail’s pace, slow enough, ironically, for even a turtle to escape.
Another hypothesis Wear put forward is that is that the silt from Olmstead and Warren lakes were placed along areas clearly visible from Riverwatch, and the added silt and dirt changed the look of the environment, possibly confusing the animals.
Savannah Riverkeeper Tonya Bonitatibus agrees with the hypothesis put forth by Wear that the turtles might have woken up one morning and found all the furniture in their house rearranged.
“When you change an area, or a habitat, you may change the way the turtles use the area, which might cause them to migrate,” Bonitatibus said.
Hameed Malik, director of the Augusta Engineering Department, says turtles migrating and getting killed on Riverwatch Parkway has been a long-term problem, especially during the March-to-April mating season. However, Malik was surprised to learn of the juvenile turtles being killed.
Malik says the city is taking action.
“I have a plan to place a barrier all along the tree line. We want to create something that has a nice aesthetic and isn’t unappealing, but also makes it impossible for them to get into the roadway,” Malik said.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
