POTSDAM— SUNY Potsdam hosted a free campus screening of a new documentary that shines a spotlight on the urgent fight to protect one of New York State’s most threatened species. “The Quiet Battle to Save the Blanding’s Turtles of New York,” directed by filmmaker Ari Taub, was shown as part of the College’s Biology Department Seminar Series.
The documentary is the second installment in Taub’s “Turtles of North America” series. This edition centers on the decades-long conservation work led by SUNY Potsdam Professor of Biology Dr. Glenn Johnson, who has become one of the state’s leading experts on the Blanding’s turtle.
The film also features Angelena Ross ’02, a SUNY Potsdam alumna who now serves as the Avian and Mammal Diversity Unit Leader for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, along with current SUNY Potsdam students and recent graduates who are actively participating in field research.
Through on-the-ground footage and interviews, the documentary explores the constellation of threats contributing to the species’ decline-including habitat loss, road mortality and shifting environmental conditions.
“We don’t see young Blanding’s turtles anymore, not like we did when I moved here in 1998. The young ones are not making it through. The hope is by protecting nests and nesting areas, we will start to see younger individuals,” Johnson said. “The filmmaker was following us as we were creating nesting habitats, a conservation method to prevent loss from road crossings. Female turtles are particularly at risk, as they will travel up to a mile and a half to different wetlands to lay eggs. We have been protecting individual nests for many years, and in some cases for 25 years.”
Viewers follow Johnson, Ross and student researchers as they track turtles across wetlands and monitor movement patterns. They also build protected nesting habitats designed to protect eggs from predators like raccoons and skunks, placed strategically so that the turtles don’t need to cross roadways to access them.
“Blanding’s turtles can live to be 80-plus years old. They get old, but they don’t really age — that’s something we would really like to study and understand more. They lay eggs right to the last second. But they don’t start to breed until 14 or so for males, and until 18 to 20 for females. We have the best populations of Blanding’s turtles here in Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties,” Johnson said.
As Johnson prepares for retirement, he will still collaborate on research, and is now passing on oversight of the conservation duties to Ross and her colleagues at the DEC. They have also collaborated extensively on efforts to rebuild the spruce grouse population in the Adirondacks, among other threatened species research.
The documentary was also showcased at the 2025 meeting of the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society. Additional screenings are in the works.
