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Up Close with George Gress
Nature Conservancy land steward and fire specialist George Gress is a “mountain of a man,” but he’s got an eye for detail and a soft spot for little critters
By Courtney Leatherman
Renaissance man George Gress is a self-taught carpenter, photographer, naturalist and wood carver. (The Conservancy taught him how to be a burn boss.) He’s found ways to incorporate his myriad talents into his job as a land steward in pennsylvania, where he’s lived his entire life. His passions run from measuring and monitoring bog turtles to carving songbirds to restoring ecological balance through fire.
Year-round, you can be found looking for bog turtles at a Pennsylvania Nature Conservancy preserve or out lecturing about them. Why so much interest in this tiny creature?
Turtles as a whole have fascinated me since I was a kid. I’m not sure why—part of it is that they’re long-lived, and I saw that as being old and wise and all that. The bog turtle is the smallest turtle we have [in North America]—they’re about 4 inches long—and they’re very friendly. But their habitats have been diminishing, and they’re in trouble.
So I understand you started a radio telemetry project to track them over two-plus years and learn more about their habits and preferred habitats.
We fitted nine turtles with radio transmitters. I was out there every week locating the turtles—on spring days and on really cold winter days, when I’d reach my hand in to find where the turtle was and how deep it was hibernating and my fingers would get numb.
Wait a minute, why did you need to check them in the winter? I thought they were hibernating.
We actually did record some movement during hibernation. There was one female who was hibernating under the root clump of a red maple. One day I reached in and found her. The next day I reached into the same hole and found a male. The two turtles were there together the whole winter, and they moved around a foot or two.
What else did you learn?
The depth of hibernation and the distances they move from one year to the next. So it gave us good ideas about how to restore and expand habitat. They need areas to stay open in terms of tree canopy because the eggs are incubated by the sun.
Another interesting thing was that from 1969 to the mid-1980s a biology teacher doing research at our preserve had marked about 100 turtles. In spring 2005, I found a female turtle he marked in 1970. She would be at least 48 years old. As far as I know, that’s the oldest wild bog turtle anywhere in their range. We named her Eve.
