On Wednesday morning, Clarence Stevens knelt in the freezing rain by a lake in Beaver Bank.
One at a time he was picking up baby snapping turtles and warming them in his cupped hands.
As the heat from his hands was transferred to each of the cold-blooded snapping turtles they would begin to move again.
With life returned to their limbs, Stevens carried each the final few metres to the lake a cold snap on Tuesday evening had prevented them from making.
“It’s just fortunate we were able to find them before something else came along because everything in nature likes to eat baby turtles,” said Stevens, founding member of the Nova Scotia Turtle Patrol.
Snapping turtles usually hatch out of their leathery eggs in this province in September.
Stevens and his volunteers knew many would hatch late this year because of a cold wet spring that saw females coming ashore to dig nests later than normal.
So with warm and wet weather predicted for Tuesday, Turtle Patrol volunteers were out across the province checking documented nests for hatchlings.
He and the group he travelled with on Tuesday checked about 30 sites in the Halifax area, assisting the endangered snapping turtle babies as they made their first desperate scramble to the relative safety of water.
Then on Tuesday evening, the temperature plunged and when Stevens and his volunteers headed out on Wednesday morning to sites they hadn’t had time to visit the day before, they found baby turtles frozen stiff just metres from the shore.
“These creatures were cold stunned – it can happen to any cold-blooded animal late in the fall,” said Stevens.
This is the latest his organization has recorded snapping turtles hatching in their four years documenting the animals.
