Heather Nelson of Zoo New England dug her fingers through the dirt in the back yard of a home in Concord.
"This part is going to be a pretty slow process," she said as she carefully examined the dirt. "We're just going to be very gently digging down."
She was looking for a turtle's nest.
She knew it was there because the mother turtle had been wearing a radio transmitter. Nelson and her team had been protecting the nest with a little cage.
Emilie Wilder from Zoo New England watched Nelson dig, and warned: they didn't know what they were about to find.
"There could be just eggs, there could be dead turtles, or there could be live turtles that have hatched out. But because it's a little bit chilly already now, they're maybe kind of hunkering down and not sure yet about emerging," Wilder said.
Below the dirt, Nelson uncovered the top of an egg, and carefully dug around it. Then, with a gasp, she made a happy discovery.
"And we have a live tiny little hatchling!" she said. "Since this is her first nest, her babies are really small. This is much smaller than a normal Blanding's turtle. But look at that, it's a successful nest!"
A little bit of eggshell and yolk still clung to the little turtle, which was smaller than an Oreo.
Nelson kept digging and found four more tiny turtles and two eggs that had yet to hatch.
Globally, Blanding's turtles are considered endangered.
"And right here in Massachusetts, we don't know exactly how many there are left, but their population is declining," Wilder said. "There's only a few, kind of, places around the state where you can still find them."
One of those places is where this nest was buried: Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, just across a rail trail from the backyard where Nelson uncovered the nest.
When the team from Zoo New England first started looking at the population of Blanding's turtles here 22 years ago, they found very few juveniles.
"Too many of the nests were being dug up by predators," Wilder said. "And of those few hatchlings that were surviving, they were getting eaten by predators."
So they started a program to protect those little guys. The team brings hatchlings to about 40 elementary schools in Massachusetts, where kids raise them for a year before the turtles are released back into the wild.
"And by the time they've gone through that head-starting process, we've taken a quarter-sized turtle and we've grown it to be about the size of what, I always say, a quarter-pounder cheeseburger is the goal," Wilder said.
That makes the turtles a lot tougher for predators to eat.
Since the program started, Wilder said the population at Great Meadows in Concord has gone from around 55 adult turtles to around 300.
And this year, three of their nests were made by turtles who were fostered in Massachusetts classrooms. One of those reptiles, a 16-year-old named Small Fry, made this particular nest.
"The mom was head-started at the Alcott School right here in Concord, and that is where I'm going tomorrow," Wilder said.
The next day, Wilder walked into a fourth-grade classroom.
"You guys are excited?" she asked the class full of eager kids. "You know what's coming to your school today?"
The unanimous reply was yelled out with joy: "Turtles!"
Wilder started off with a reality check. Of the 10 species of turtles in Massachusetts, six of them are considered rare or endangered.
"More than half of our native turtles are in trouble and need our help," she told the fourth graders. "Do you guys want to help them out?"
"Yeah!" the kids cried out in unison.
Wilder told them the story of Small Fry, who was here in their very own school 16 years ago, and whose babies she met just the day before.
"They're not ready to come to school yet, but they probably will be ready in a few weeks," she said. "And I thought, what if I could bring Alcott hatchlings from the Alcott Small Fry Turtle back to Alcott? Do you guys want to raise those Alcott hatchlings?"
Another unanimous cheer of support.
For now, though, Wilder brought out another tiny turtle for the kids to start raising now, and walked around the classroom with it, as the students followed her instruction to greet it quietly, softly squealing with joy at the adorable little creature.
Who knows, maybe some day this tiny turtle will have its own babies, and yet another generation will be cared for here in this same school.
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