By Donald Wittkowski
Tim O’Brien scooped up a diamondback terrapin that was crawling perilously in the middle of the road next to the marshlands along Dory Drive in Ocean City’s south end. Right after he placed the turtle safely on the side of the roadway on Friday afternoon, he spotted another one that had blundered under his parked pickup truck.
“When I see them in the road, I’ll take them in my truck until I can find a safe spot to release them,” O’Brien, the owner of Gold Coast Landscaping in Ocean City, explained of his turtle rescues. “There’s always a lot of them down here.”
Similar scenes play out many, many times during the summer along the Jersey Shore as scores of female diamondback terrapins emerge from their coastal marshlands habitat in search of a patch of sandy soil for a nesting area to lay their eggs.
Unfortunately, the trips made by the small turtles often take them across busy roads, with many of them run over by cars in the process. As a warning to motorists, there are already turtle-crossing signs posted in parts of Ocean City, but one councilman believes there should be more.
Tony Wilson told his fellow City Council members during a meeting Thursday night that he would like to see turtle-crossing signs also placed along Dory Drive. Wilson recalled how he had stopped two lanes of traffic on Dory Drive to rescue two diamondback terrapins.
“I’m nuts about it. I can’t help it,” he said of his passion for helping turtles.
Donna Moore, a local resident and former member of Ocean City’s Environmental Commission who has studied diamondback terrapins, said most of the turtle-crossing signs are concentrated along West Avenue, south of 34th Street, parallel to the marshlands. There is also at least one turtle sign on Bay Avenue adjacent to the wetlands near 55th Street, heading south into Strathmere.
Moore attended the Council meeting when Wilson called for turtle-crossing signs to be installed on Dory Road.
“That’s really commendable. I hope he maintains his passion,” she said of Wilson in an interview later.
The yellow turtle-crossing signs already up on West Avenue, a county road, include a big image of a turtle with the letters “X-ING” underneath.
Once they crawl into the road, the slow creatures are usually no match for the fast-moving motor vehicle traffic. Their grayish-green color also blends in with the road surface, making them hard to see for motorists.
Moore told City Council that the roadway fatalities, combined with a loss of their natural habitat, have nearly turned the diamondbacks into an endangered species. She also noted that it takes eight years before a female reaches maturity to lay eggs, adding to the challenges for the diamondbacks to reproduce.
Moore wants turtle barriers erected along sections of Ocean City’s wetlands, as well as the Roosevelt Boulevard entryway into town, to prevent the diamondbacks from crawling into the road. She said that the Margate Bridge, for instance, has partially buried 10-inch pipes in the ground parallel to the roadway to redirect the turtles away from traffic.
In the meantime, there are people like landscaper Tim O’Brien and Councilman Tony Wilson who are keeping an eye out, hoping to rescue more diamondbacks before they become roadkill.
“You do what you can, right? That’s the best you can do,” O’Brien said as he removed one turtle from the road and placed it safely next to the marshlands at the corner of Dory Drive and West 52nd Street.
