Each month we feature one of the 95 IBA’s (Important Bird Area) in North Carolina. This month our team from Wilmington is showcasing the Bald Head-Smith Island IBA‘s rich coastal habitat. This post is written by Audubon North Carolina's Lindsay Addison.

Say the word “turtle,” and most people probably think of a black algae-covered cooter lounging in a pond or hauled out on a log. Folks who live by the ocean may think of a colossal mother sea turtle lumbering up the beach to lay her eggs or a palm-sized hatchling scrambling to the water. Not many people  probably think of a brackish water specialist with elaborately patterned skin and shell and a unique life history.

The diamond-back terrapin is the only turtle known to live exclusively in estuaries. Estuaries, where rivers meet the sea, contain a mix of salt and fresh water called brackish water. They are remarkably productive ecosystems, harboring young fish, crabs, oysters, and other marine life. The diamond-back terrapin makes its home in estuaries from Cape Cod to south Texas. They enjoy a varied diet of fish, clams, worms, snails, crabs, and plants. Once considered a gourmet food themselves, their populations plummeted but today they enjoy protection, although bycatch in crap pots remains a threat. (Crabbers can ensure they don’t trap and kill diamond-back terrapins or other small animals by closing their traps’ doors when they are out of the water; by storing them in safe places, not in the marsh or on a shoreline; and by equipping their pots with a turtle excluder device.)

In Bald-Head Smith Island IBA, these little turtles spend the summer months from May to July laying their eggs. The bay beaches and shell rakes of the IBA provide their nesting habitat. During laying, females emerge, like other turtles, to dig a hole and deposit their eggs. To select the perfect site, females may wander quite a bit on land. If you’re lucky enough to find one, you can help her by watching from a distance.

The 8-12 eggs will gestate for about 60 days (loggerhead sea turtles take about the same time) and produce tiny hatchlings. Like most turtles, the hatchlings’ sex is determined by temperature—hotter temperatures produce females and lower temperatures produce males. Hatchlings are on their own when they emerge. They can endure colder weather, so most enter the world right away, but some wait for the spring, spending the winter underground and emerging, like this hatchling did, when the weather warms up.

Also like sea turtles, the odds of hatchlings’ survival are long, but when they mature into adults they are a distinctive ornament to estuaries all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.