16,000 tiny miracles are marching back into the wild

The Southern Ontario At Risk Reptiles program just wrapped its best season ever: 984 nests of seven turtle species and one snake, incubated by hand and released as more than 16,000 hatchlings into southern Ontario waterways. The headline rescue is the spiny softshell — one of Canada's most endangered reptiles — whose nests yielded a record 458, expected to produce up to 7,000 baby turtles. The work ran on roughly 50 partners and volunteers, including the Chippewas of the Thames and Oneida Nation of the Thames First Nations, and has already produced the first documented increase in the softshell's population in over a century.