New Hampshire Turtle Rescue Inc.

Our Background

New Hampshire Turtle Rescue's Mission is to rescue, rehabilitate, release, and preserve native turtle species through individualized care, public education, outreach, and scientific research in support of imperiled populations of wild New Hampshire turtles.

NHTR was founded in 2022 by licensed wildlife rehabilitators Dallas Huggins and Drew Stevens to continue providing specialized care for native New Hampshire turtle species after the retirement of longtime independent rehabilitator Chris Bogard. Under her guidance, Huggins and Stevens learned the intricacies of emergency medical care, husbandry, and the importance of proper release protocols to ensure that patients are released back into the local populations from which they came. Huggins and Stevens are now the only active rehabilitators in New Hampshire permitted to admit and care for Blanding’s Turtles, Spotted Turtles, Wood Turtles, and Eastern Box Turtles.

Because of their delayed reproductive maturity and long lifespans, many local wild turtle populations are sustained by a very small number of adult individuals. In New Hampshire, four out of the seven native turtle species are listed by the state as species of special concern, threatened, or endangered with extinction. Rehabilitating injured turtles and returning them to their homes helps to ensure their survival, their ability to reproduce, and helps to mitigate the negative impacts of habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, and other forms of human interference, ultimately supporting the preservation of these important species for future generations.

Our Fundraising Goal: Remote Monitoring of Patients

Camera monitoring plays a crucial role in the rehabilitation of wild turtles, offering a non-invasive and highly effective method for observing their behavior, health, and recovery progress. Turtles who have experienced trauma tend to stay very withdrawn, especially in the presence of perceived predators like humans. By installing cameras in our patients’ enclosures, we can continuously monitor their demeanor without causing them stress through human presence and interaction. This provides us a much clearer picture of the extent of their injuries, especially those which affect their ambulatory abilities and locomotion, allowing us to form physical therapy plans to help patients better recover from these potential disabilities.

Another area in which camera monitoring has been indispensable is when our patients are gravid (egg-bearing) females. Stress of physical trauma coupled with human presence is especially pronounced in gravid turtles, who must lay all their eggs before they can be released back into the wild. The natural nesting and egg-laying process is highly sensitive to stress and disturbance, and surgical egg extraction, while an option, is fraught with risks, invasiveness, and high costs. Remote observation lowers these stressors to a level where we have found good success with many patients laying their clutches naturally, without the use of induction hormones or surgical extractions. This also allows us to recover the clutch of eggs as soon as they are laid and begin incubating them; turtle eggs are very delicate once they have been laid, and if they are trampled or moved by the patient, it can cause them not to be viable, so it is imperative that we retrieve them immediately.

During NH Gives 2025, our goal is to raise $5000 in order to outfit all of our patient enclosures with high-quality cameras to monitor their behavior and progress as they recover from their injuries. Thanks to a very generous grant from The Caswell Foundation, we have been able to purchase and install all of the necessary backend hardware required to support streaming and recording from all of the observation cameras we hope to purchase through this fundraiser. We have secured $3050 in matching donations from supporters, local businesses, and our Board of Directors, so that every donation made will be matched dollar-for-dollar towards our goal!

Give now and double your impact to support New Hampshire's native turtles — no contribution is too small!