Turtles all the way down: The fight to save the endangered bell turtle

Aided by the saving our species partnership grant and known as the 'turtles forever' project, Local Land Services in conjunction with the University of New England are Incubating and releasing baby turtles into their natural environment.

Bell turtles are unique to the Northern Tablelands, approximately 250 baby bell turtles were released into the Beardy waters and Severn River near Glen Innes, as one of several releases in the region.

Senior services officer at Northern Tablelands Local Land Services, Martin Dillion said the bells turtles are in dire trouble.

"There's barely any adult bell turtles left," Mr Dillion said.

"The ones that are left are quite old, there are no juvenile turtles because foxes are eating 97 to 100 per cent of the nest every single season.

"Chances of survival of these hatchlings unfortunately is low, but we have to do everything we can do to intervene."

Mr Dillion is hopeful that of the 254 hatchlings released, a good number of them will reach maturity and help the population thrive into the future.

"They can live a long time. This is just one part of the program to try and reinforce their population.

"We have a comprehensive monitoring program; we actually mark them with little notches and each turtle gets a unique monitoring number.

"We can track how they survive, where they move, how they grow. We'll be looking out for these hatchlings in the coming years once they get big enough to come into the traps, at which point we will get a solid understanding of how successful the program can be."

He said the most effective way to protect the turtles' nestling areas from foxes is with temporary, electrified fox-seclusion fencing protecting the turtles high quality nesting areas on stream bands during the breeding season from mid-November to February.

"We're just starting to catch some of the turtles that we released four or five years ago now," Mr Dillion said.

"It's a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, as you can imagine, a tiny turtle in a big river system, but we certainly feel the program has so far been a success.

"We have a partnership with canines for wildlife, who have sniffer dogs that have been trained to find bells turtles' nests, we protect those nests with mesh and we also build fox exclusion fences on good nesting areas to try and keep the foxes out completely."

PhD student at the University of New England Lou Streeting has been studying conservation practices of the bells turtle. Her project involves the protection of wild nests of bells turtles from fox depredation and the artificial incubation of eggs harvested from hormonally induced females and the release of the hatchlings into the wild.

"This year we had 254 hatchlings to release into the river systems," Ms Streeting said.

"There are not very many juveniles, and there's very, very few adults as well and the adults that are up here are quite old so it's looking quite dire up in this area.

"When we were trying to trap for gravid females to harvest eggs, it was really noticeable that they just weren't the numbers in this area compared to the other populations of bells turtles which is why this area has been chosen today."