Northern Ontario’s turtle tussle pits scientists against quarry builders, with a threatened species caught in the middle
When ecologists found a haven for Blanding’s turtles on a patch of Crown land, they waded into a conflict that is testing the Ford government’s new policy on endangered species protection.
Ms. Zagorski’s a field biologist, said she was working on her masters degree at Laurentian University in Sudbury and began looking for Blanding’s turtles, an extremely rare and globally endangered species, in a soggy pocket of provincial Crown land about 150 kilometres west of the city. Over two summers, she and her teammates found a whopping 56 Blanding’s turtles concentrated in an area that measures about three kilometres across. It may not seem like many but this makes the site one of the richest and most densely populated refuges for the species ever found in Canada.
Now, these Blanding’s turtles are caught in a showdown between a company that is seeking to turn the site into a quarry and local residents who oppose the project.
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Miscellany
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Photo from GINO DONATO/THE GLOBE AND MAIL.
