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Conservancy Expands Mountain Wetlands Preserve

Orchard Bog Is Refuge for Threatened Bog Turtle

Nashville, TN—7 November 2006—With two recent land purchases, The Nature Conservancy has more than doubled the size of a significant wetlands preserve in the uplands of northeastern Tennessee.

Located in Johnson County’s Shady Valley, Orchard Bog Preserve is one of the last refuges for the rare and threatened bog turtle. The preserve is also a key habitat for 25 other kinds of rare animals and plants, including wild cranberries and Nuttall pondweed. The bog turtle is a bellwether species for these mountain wetlands; its long-term health and survival are indicators for the long-term prospects for the entire bog ecosystem.

In 1996, in an effort to protect the bog turtle, The Nature Conservancy purchased a single 1.5-acre tract, creating Orchard Bog Preserve. Now, with the acquisition of two new tracts, the preserve has grown from 73 to 169 acres. The new parcels adjoin Orchard Bog along a creek that is a major migration point for the turtles. The Nature Conservancy plans to do stream and wetlands restoration on the new tracts to improve the habitat for the turtles and other species.

Much of the newly acquired land supported a dairy farm in years past and the Conservancy will continue to lease it in the near future as pasture for cattle, though new fencing will keep cows from encroaching on the creek and damaging the habitat. By carefully managing the land this way, explains Shady Valley program manager Charles McQueen, “We’ll show farmers and landowners that they can farm and do other things on their properties and still protect the water and the land.”

Formed 10,000 years ago with the retreat of the last Ice Age, the mountain bogs of Shady Valley are vanishing remnants of wetlands that once covered much of northeastern Tennessee. Over the past century, landowners drained most of those wetlands to create farmland.

Since 1996, The Nature Conservancy has worked to reverse this trend, acquiring and restoring more than 100 wetland acres in two of its Shady Valley preserves, Orchard Bog and Quarry Bog. The expansion and restoration efforts in Orchard Bog seem to be benefiting the bog turtle. “Each year more turtles are moving into the preservation area,” says Lynn Eastin, biological technician for the Conservancy. “It’s not prime habitat yet, but with the restoration efforts it’s getting better.”

Bog turtle authority Bern Tryon, who first began studying bog turtles in Shady Valley in 1986, has been tracking their movements through radio telemetry devices since 2001. Tryon, director of collections for herpetology at the Knoxville Zoo, feels the new tracts were well chosen. “With just a little restoration work, some of that area will probably quickly return to habitat suitable for bog turtles,” he says. “So that’s extremely exciting, and it could potentially add a tremendous amount of area to the Orchard Bog restoration.”

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The Nature Conservancy is a leading international, nonprofit organization that preserves plants, animals and natural communities representing the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. In Tennessee, we have helped protect more than 220,000 acres. Visit us on the Web at nature.org/Tennessee.