If I wanted to find a bog turtle, I would need to bring two things: muck boots and patience. “And not necessarily in that order,” said Brian Parr over the phone. The natural resource specialist with the Nature Conservancy in Asheville, North Carolina, was managing my expectations before I visited him in the northwest corner of the state. Amid the vast forests carpeting the corrugated slopes of the Appalachians sit some of the country’s only remaining mountain bogs and a rare, threatened species of turtle living in them.

For slogging through knee-deep mud in search of an animal no larger than a softball, the boots made sense. The patience, well, that worried me. I had assumed that bog turtles were slow-moving and therefore easy to find. Parr snort-laughed at this. Even experts can have a hard time locating the turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii, in the few remaining Appalachian habitats where it’s holding on—despite its Day-Glo orange neck. The reptile’s short, muscular limbs easily propel it through a landscape that proves far more challenging to humans: mud festooned with sedges that poke the skin of the unwary with their prickly seedpods and half-buried tree limbs waiting to trip traversers.

For more than 200 years, farmers have ditched and drained what seemed like swampy hellscapes, not investing in their potential as riparian refugia and buffers for floods or as carbon sequesterers and nutrient recyclers. There were once about 5,000 acres of bog habitat in North Carolina, but today there are roughly 500. Over the past century, the numbers of bog turtles and other rare species that call these mountain bogs home have plummeted with them, including the small, white-flowered bunched arrowhead and the endangered carnivorous mountain sweet pitcher plant. Researchers in North Carolina have found fewer than 100 bog turtle populations across the state. In addition to loss of habitat, the turtles also face poachers who seek to sell the imperiled animals on the black market.

Brian Parr, Hope Killian, Helen Morris, and Emilly Nolan (left to right) walk through a recently established bog area in North Carolina.

Northern bog turtles have federal protection, but their southern counterparts, bafflingly, don’t. Biologists could boost their numbers by facilitating baby-making at local zoos and protecting hatchlings during their precarious first year. But then what? The turtles would have nowhere to go. To begin to save the threatened species, someone had to rebuild their home. In 2023, Parr and his colleagues at the Nature Conservancy began creating a fen—a type of wetland that is closely related to a bog but has more nutrients and less acidic soil and is fed by seeping underground water rather than rainwater. (Since both habitats exist in western North Carolina, most people refer to them indiscriminately as bogs, said Parr.)

Before farming, when the landscape was healthy, many ecological forces had conspired to create bog turtle habitat. Restoring this habitat is challenging because scientists have not been able to pin down exactly how it arose from this landscape. Some historians think that beavers—before the animals were trapped to near extinction—played an important part by damming creeks and streams to slow water flow, which made parts of the ground too saturated to hold trees. Without as many trees, patches of sphagnum moss and sedges grew in, poking above the waterline to serve as turtle nests and allowing the animals to bask in the sun. Today, the ecosystem is struggling. When conservationists with the Nature Conservancy and other wildlife groups began their bog-building project over a decade ago, they had to perform every ecological task that the now-absent flora and fauna normally would.

Despite growing awareness of the importance of wetlands as buffers against the effects of anthropogenic climate change, such as sea level rise, Appalachian bogs and fens haven’t been able to shake their reputation as wastelands.

Across the country, restoration ecologists are shifting from focusing conservation efforts on single species to rebuilding holistic ecosystems for a range of species under threat: beavers in the forests and rivers of the Mountain West, Gulf sturgeon and black rails in Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands, and burrowing owls in the grasslands on the central California coast. The animals and their homes may be disappearing, but hope for their dual return is not. The ridiculously cute bog turtle—the smallest turtle species in North America—has become a mascot for Appalachian wetlands in particular, similar to the Florida panther and the manatee, two charismatic but threatened species whose protection benefits large swaths of landscape. “[Bog turtles are] a good animal to represent their habitat,” said Manley Fuller, vice president of conservation policy at the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, his gravelly voice tinged with more than a hint of Southern twang. “People love ’em.”

The survival of Glyptemys muhlenbergii depends on this love more than ever. The May 2023 ruling of the US Supreme Court in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency stripped the government of its ability to protect many wetlands and other aquatic ecosystems under the Clean Water Act. Over the past few years, many state protections have also been stripped. Without either safeguard, Fuller noted, the future of the few remaining Appalachian Mountain bogs is more perilous than ever because everyone from state officials to local landowners could pollute, dam, and ditch these rare waters with few repercussions. Making the situation worse, just as the decade-in-the-making bog turtle efforts began to really pick up steam last year, Hurricane Helene barreled across Florida and Georgia before stalling out over Tennessee and western North Carolina. In under a week, the storm dumped 40 trillion gallons of water in the region, enough to fill 80 million Olympic swimming pools. The catastrophic flooding erased some communities from the map. In the chaotic days that followed, no one knew whether the half-built bogs had been enough to shelter turtles from the storm.

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of years ago, the peaks of the Appalachians rivaled the Andes in size, but eons of wind and rain have worn them down to the far more modest heights we now see. Shifting tectonic plates left the weathered rock creased and folded like a once-crumpled piece of paper that someone failed to fully smooth out. The eastern side of the Appalachians bears many steep slopes, which typically encourage waters to flow swiftly as they sprint toward the Atlantic. The Blue Ridge Mountains, on the other hand, have gentle, rolling slopes. The mountains’ ubiquitous wrinkles force creeks and rivulets to pause on their mad dash to the Mississippi River—the perfect hydrology for creating some of the region’s wetlands.

 Adult bog turtles are about four inches long and weigh around four ounces.

Scientists have theorized that deep cuts in the corrugated rock provided opportunities for underground seeps to burble out onto the surface, shifting, merging, and staking new trails in the rock. What likely resulted was a massive network of small fens that were individually transient but collectively stable enough to support flora and fauna that survive in wet environments at high altitudes. Carbon samples taken from wetlands in Nantahala National Forest in western North Carolina suggest parts of this landscape have been wetlands for around 8,000 years. During that time, different species may have reigned, with beavers terraforming a deeper habitat that later gave way to the shallower one bog turtles prefer. “There would have been changes, and that would have been OK,” said Mike Knoerr, a wildlife biologist with the US Forest Service.

The changes that settlers brought to the landscape, however, have been less OK. When the first wagon trains creaked across the Cumberland Gap, which divides Kentucky from Virginia, the mountain pass revealed a dense, biodiverse landscape. Early migrants to Southern Appalachia likely soon realized that the area had agricultural potential and developed swaths of the region’s land for their corn, grains, and livestock. Local landowner Ron Linville pointed out that modern developers are guilty of the same thing, invariably digging ditches and draining the fens so potential buyers can better view their purchase. Despite growing awareness of the importance of wetlands as buffers against the effects of anthropogenic climate change, such as sea level rise, Appalachian bogs and fens haven’t been able to shake their reputation as wastelands. “For years, [people have] not seen and recognized the value that wetlands have. It’s only more recently that we’ve started to protect our wetlands and started to understand their biodiversity and the plethora of flora and fauna that they host,” said Julia Vineyard, a field biologist at the Nature Conservancy’s Massachusetts chapter.

The disappearance of these valuable wetlands isn’t a problem for just bog turtles. Their loss creates a domino effect of damage for all species that depend on bogs and fens—including humans. Wetlands store vast quantities of both water and carbon, and their microhabitats drive a biodiversity engine, said Will Harlan, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Southeast is the biodiversity hot spot of the world for freshwater species like bog turtles, mussels, and salamanders,” he said. “We just need to give [this ecosystem] space, and it will continue to thrive.”

KNOERR SPENT his childhood roaming the wetlands and savannas of northern Illinois in search of all creatures scaled and slimy. He went on to pursue a master’s in fish and wildlife conservation at Clemson University, which, along with the state of North Carolina, had recognized the need to better understand the bog turtle. In 2014, Knoerr was thrilled to begin researching such an elusive creature. Biologists knew the Southern turtles were in decline, but they needed to know why—and how close they were to vanishing.

“As long as we’ve been monitoring bog turtle populations, bog turtle populations have been disappearing. They’re tough to keep on the landscape,” Knoerr said.

Brian Dempsey points out signs of turtle activity.

The patchwork of bogs that once decorated the Southern Appalachians like pearls on a string is now only a handful of pearls separated by lengths of string. When a bog disappears, owing to natural causes or human hands, wildlife has nowhere to go. The obvious explanation for bog turtle decline would seem to be bog destruction, but researchers have also found plenty of suitable habitat in nearby intact bogs where they have never observed turtles. In 2015, to understand the network of factors affecting turtle numbers, Knoerr began studying a site that had been privately protected from development for many decades. (To avoid tipping off poachers, researchers requested to keep the location anonymous.) Time had healed some of the bog’s wounds, and Nature Conservancy workers tackled the remaining issues, which included the Sisyphean task of removing the invasive multiflora rose that had choked out native vegetation. Interns fired up chainsaws to remove the large stands of poplar and pine that had popped up since humans ceased their ditching and quarrying—all of that would have to go to make room for the turtles. Within months of their initial efforts—with the addition of a few log dams—the soil dampened, then turned to deep muck, an ideal spot for house-hunting turtles. Indeed, a few bog turtles moved in, but the residents seemed to be geriatric. No baby turtles were being born to replace the adults that had died off.

For months, Knoerr spent every waking hour at the protected bog. He befriended every orb weaver spider and the rivulets that braided through the muck. He also became familiar with the skunks, opossums, and raccoons traipsing through the area, which partly explained what was happening to the next generation of turtles. The midsize predators loved to dine on turtle eggs. With these animals moving in even faster than humans, the sheer volume of predators was making it impossible for turtles to sustain their numbers. Knoerr watched the bog closely in 2016 and 2017, and throughout his vigil only a single turtle egg survived to adulthood. Most of the other hundred-odd eggs were eaten or destroyed by predators. Witnessing this loss was a crushing blow for Knoerr.

“An entire generation of turtles can disappear in a single night,” said Brian Dempsey, a field biologist with the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy.

In his darkest moments, Knoerr began to wonder why he bothered trying to help the turtles, but as time passed, he recognized that his project wasn’t just about a single species at risk. It was about saving an entire landscape, and that was worth the effort. The scope of that endeavor was too much work for a single person, however, even one as devoted as Knoerr. After he talked to Nature Conservancy researchers about his discoveries, they recruited a team of local biologists from Defenders of Wildlife and the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy to help out.

In the center of the bog, where Knoerr had found the bulk of the eggs in previous years, the team erected a knee-high electric fence to keep out foraging predators. They covered nests outside the perimeter with bucket-shaped chicken-wire enclosures. The contraptions kept hatchlings safe from even the most dexterous raccoon. The team installed cameras to monitor the turtles from afar. Knoerr chopped down a few additional trees and trimmed back the sedges and other grasses. In September 2018, when turtle eggs started hatching, Knoerr held his breath. Six weeks later, he exhaled. Nearly every turtle survived.

This time- and labor-intensive experiment showed that such holistic conservation efforts pay off. To save an entire species, however, biologists would have to not only maintain their efforts at this initial bog but also replicate them elsewhere to fill out the pearl necklace once again.

SCENIC OVERLOOKS decorate the two-lane highways that meander through northwestern North Carolina. Pullouts accompany the many hairpin turns, offering views of the indigo hills that give the Blue Ridge Mountains their name. Surrounded by such natural beauty, I had high hopes when I parked next to a well-traveled byway to stake out my first bog in August 2024. If I hadn’t been following Parr’s battered pickup, I would never have known there was anything special here.

Helen Morris holds a bog turtle found at a site in North Carolina. Some researchers think that unique orange neck patches can help identify individual turtles.

Parr, Dempsey, and Emilly Nolan, the Southern Appalachians program coordinator at the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, had been monitoring the revamped site along with Helen Morris from Defenders of Wildlife and Hope Killian from Tangled Bank Conservation. Their purpose that day was to ensure that Knoerr’s fence was still functioning and to replace batteries in camera traps. We pushed our way through dense undergrowth that swallowed the sounds of passing cars. Every step required us to wrestle a giant bramble patch for possession of shirt sleeves and pant legs. Not infrequently, the flora won. Tree-covered peaks surrounded the bog like the sides of a bowl, blocking any hint of a breeze. The still, humid air clung to our sweaty limbs like silk. We stopped in a clearing a few hundred yards from the side of the road. “This is it,” Parr announced, extending his bronzed and tattooed arms in welcome. I recognized a quote from his email signature inked on his right arm: “Think like a mountain,” a tribute to the famous conservationist Aldo Leopold. On Parr’s left arm is another homage, this one to Henry David Thoreau: “In wilderness is Earth’s salvation.”

The site looked no more distinct than the pullout where we left our cars. A maze of chest-high rushes and sedges occupied an area the size of several football fields—a kaleidoscope of green, broken only by a few deep-purple blooms of New York ironweed. What wasn’t there was just as noticeable: There were no ponds or lakes or any appreciable accumulations of precipitation. If this was a bog, where was the water?

Slowly, the steady drone of grasshoppers, crickets, and other insects gave way to a faint gurgle. I looked down, and just in front of my feet flowed a rivulet of espresso-colored water. Parr told us we were looking at what is likely the state’s densest population of Glyptemys muhlenbergii. There wasn’t a single turtle in sight.

Like the water, the turtles were lurking just beneath the surface. The razor-sharp grasses, the shrubs with fingernail-size thorns, the acidic soil—these natural defenses don’t just make up the bog turtle’s home but also act as its shield from the elements and predators alike, explained Parr. If the turtles are underground, they are safe. But to truly understand the bog, we would need to get our feet wet. I splashed mine in the middle of a small puddle and immediately sunk calf-deep in muck. The mud reluctantly released my foot with a greedy slurp. My next step was much the same. We step-slurped our way deeper into the bog, instinctively holding our hands up to avoid the saw grass. The line of us inching our way along resembled a group of bank robbers surrendering after a heist. We stopped at a short electric fence surrounding a grass patch that sat an inch or two above the rest. There’s not much elevation here, but it’s enough to keep eggs dry. Dempsey spotted a small skull lying in the dirt just outside the boundary. He picked it up and wiped away mud with a gloved thumb.

Appalachian bog turtles get a helping hand.

“Raccoon or skunk,” he said, squinting at the sizable incisors and protruding orbits. Dempsey gave the skull a last once-over, shrugged, and hung it on a fence post at a jaunty angle to create a cheeky, if macabre, warning to any errant omnivores.

Halfway across the bog, Nolan’s voice rang out: “I’ve got one!”

Standing in front of a spot the group had nicknamed “the Honey Hole” for its reliable turtle population, Nolan extended a lanky arm deep into the mud and rummaged around, heedless of her long braid dipping into the mud. Her hand emerged, stained orange-brown and dripping, clutching a turtle. Its stubby arms and legs flailed madly, trying to find purchase on Nolan’s hand. Its shell was the size of a jumbo golf ball and its limbs no larger than a thumb. Its neck, patched with flaming orange, dripped with slug slime left over from breakfast. Every bog turtle sports a similar neck pattern, and some researchers think that the precise outlines can be used like a fingerprint to identify individual turtles.

Turning the turtle onto its back, Nolan categorized her catch as male, thanks to its squat tail and the indentation on the bottom of its shell that accommodates a female below during mating. Despite the turtle’s small size, Nolan was confident he was full-grown based on the yearly growth markers on its shell called annuli. “[They’re] kind of like tree rings,” she said. The bog turtle can live up to 60 years in the wild. Using her thumbnail, she counted eight annuli on the one she had caught. This animal already sported a microchip—smaller than a grain of rice—that allows researchers to track the turtle’s identity and growth. Nolan returned it to its nest. Forty-five minutes later, she found a younger turtle (with only six annuli) that hadn’t been tagged. Counting backward, I realized the turtle was almost certainly one of the animals Knoerr shepherded to hatching in 2018. While Dempsey tested the fence and swapped out batteries, Nolan weighed and measured the turtle. This male clocked in at 66 grams, about the same weight as two AA batteries. Holding his right front leg with her pointer finger and his right back leg with her thumb, she injected the chip into the middle portion of his shell—tagging an unknown turtle with a 15-digit number.

The omnipresent efforts of conservation groups in this area mean that the turtle’s future looks bright at this bog. But when the site hits its carrying capacity, Parr, Knoerr, and the team want to create nearby refugia for excess turtles to colonize. The reality is that much of the surrounding land wants to be boggy. With just a few tweaks, such as restoring streams and working with farmers to fill ditches, much of the nearby land could once again form a healthy bog. These areas, however, aren’t owned by the Nature Conservancy and aren’t on protected state or federal lands. Lax enforcement of conservation laws means that landowners who eliminate those “wet spots” out back (and their turtle populations) face few consequences. Building a bog is tough work, but it’s nothing compared with convincing recalcitrant farmers to undo the agricultural efforts of previous generations.

ONE OF THE FEW people who didn’t need convincing was Ron Linville. After a stint on riverboats in Vietnam with the US Navy, Linville spent his career working in hydrology and habitat conservation at the state and county level in North Carolina. His work frequently took him to the northwestern corner of the state, where he fell in love with the landscape. After retiring, he bought 33 acres on the side of a mountain, then added 121 additional acres to keep the area from being developed.

“I like the critters. I’ve seen a few places that had bog turtles that just dried up and died,” he said. “It wasn’t the bog turtles that got me here, but once I found out they were here, I tried to do what I could.”

Linville’s time in the navy and his years working for the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Division of Water Quality gave him a love for the living world as well as earning him the nickname “River Rat Ron.” After he learned about the plight of the bog turtles and the importance of bringing back wetlands, he became a one-man crusader, evangelizing their importance to neighbors, community members, and even the electric company.

“A lot of people don’t realize those turtles are in jeopardy down there. They are. It’s not the land it used to be,” he said. Linville isn’t the only one setting aside land to protect these rare bogs. More than 30 sites, most privately owned, make up the Mountain Bogs National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. Though nominally administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Mountain Bogs refuge is a unique effort to preserve a rare habitat by protecting private property. Landowners can participate in a voluntary program of conservation easements, a legal agreement that limits future development of the area. In the wake of the Sackett court decision, this type of public-private collaboration is being eyed by groups trying to protect other vulnerable species spread across large landscapes, such as the Florida panther, said Harlan from the Center for Biological Diversity.

In 2023, Knoerr found another potential addition to the refuge in northwestern North Carolina when he was allowed to restore a bog on a sympathetic farmer’s property. Two service-minded locals spent a weekend hacking back trees and brush. To create an ersatz dam across the small creek, they simply left the felled trees where they landed. In just over a year, the area turned from a tree-lined stream of minimal farming value into a thriving wetland of great potential value to turtles. Knoerr doesn’t think any turtles have moved in yet, but knowing that the area is waiting for them gives him hope.

But this hope, and these restoration efforts, must also exist within the urgent realities of climate change. This is what the bog turtle team is facing as it endures the slow cleanup process in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Life for residents of western North Carolina turned into a series of question marks in the immediate aftermath of the storm: When will we have power? When will water be restored? When will our roads be passable? When will life return to normal? But Nolan had another question pinballing around in her brain: Did any of the turtles survive the storm?

Debris-laden and washed-out roads have made travel impossible and the fate of the turtles unknown. Nolan is confident some turtles are hanging on in North Carolina, but she is also bracing herself for massive population losses. Many bogs are buried under feet of mud and floodwaters, and with turtles hibernating until spring, it could be months until biologists get a full accounting of the damage. As the community shifts to preventing future disasters, the region’s wetlands loom large in official discussions, said both Nolan and Harlan. Bogs and fens wouldn’t have stopped the rain, but they could have given the water someplace to go, and time for the land to absorb it. The lesson, Harlan said, is that instead of building homes next to rivers, we should be building bogs and fens and wetlands. “We can try to outsmart nature,” he said, “but nature always bats last.”