Dam repairs prompt relocation of Cranbrook's painted turtles

It's moving day in Cranbrook if you're a turtle.

The southern B.C. city's dam on Idlewild Lake is scheduled to undergo repairs beginning in August. But the lake is prime habitat for the western painted turtle a species the province deems to be at risk so the city of Cranbrook is paying a local natural resource management company to move them to a new home

Leigh Anne Isaac, senior wildlife biologist with VAST, has spent the last few weeks cruising around the lake in a canoe with her two-person crew, scooping up turtles and then measuring them, marking them and moving them to the relocation site, a lake located in a nearby forest.

"It's actually a really fun job," Isaac told Daybreak South host Chris Walker. "We snag turtles of all sizes.".

100 down, more to go?

So far, the team has moved more than 100 turtles a lot more than they were expecting based on their initial observations.

"The majority of those are small hatchlings that have emerged from the previous winter," Isaac said, "[but there's] a good size range, indicating that the population is healthy."

Isaac said the team does not plan to move the turtles back to Idlewild Lake after construction is complete because of how the construction schedule lines up with the turtles' breeding cycle.

Turtle eggs already laid this year will hatch into hatchlings in late-summer. These loonie-sized baby turtles will spend the entire winter in the nest before emerging in the spring and returning to the aquatic environment.

"You can think of it as a new influx of baby turtles that will repopulate and re-establish that previous population [next year]," Isaac said.

With files from CBC's Daybreak South.