by MIKE STAHLBERG
The Register-Guard

"They're really cute," Kat Beal says of the tiny critters about the size of a silver dollar. "Well, as cute as a reptile gets, anyway."

"They" are baby Western pond turtles and Beal, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wildlife biologist, has been playing nursemaid to them after they peck theIr way out of the eggs in a sand-fiIled incubator box in her garage.

It's all part of a "head start" program intended to keep the WIllamette Valley's population of pond turtles from sinking into the soup of "endangered species" status.

More than 60 eggs were removed from nests near Fern Ridge Reservoir last spring, and nearly a third of these have hatched so far. Biologists plan to coddle the turtle hatchlings while they grow large enough to be less appetizing to bullfrogs, bass and other predators.

The Corps of Engineers and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife hope the project will help slow an alarming mortalitily rate among young turtles.

Pond turtle populations are already declining sharply in Oregon and Northern California. The turtle has virtually disappeared from Washington state. Three environmental groups last year petitioned the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service seeking to have the reptile listed under the federal Edangered Species Act.

The Fish & WIldlife Service declined, ruling that the turtle is not on the brink of extinction. Although clearly affected by human activities, the agency said, turtles are still found over 90 percent of their range.

The southern Willamette Valley's largest remaining population of turtles is at Fern Ridge ReservoIr west of Eugene, a Corps of Engineers facility. About 200 turtles are believed to live in and around the southwest side of the lake.

What worries biologists, however, is not so much the total number of turtles but the composition of the population.

About 95 percent of all the turtles checked are mature adults -- an indication that very few juvenile turtles are suviving.

"Virtually no young have been recruited into the population in 10 or 15 years," said Bill Costillo, district wildlife biologist for the ODFW's Upper Willamette District.

Of all the isolated populations of pond turtles in the area, only one on the Coast Fork of the Willamette River appears to have a broad mix of age groups, Beal said.

Human activities - including the importation of non-native predators - have had a drastic effect on turtles and their habitat, Castillo says.

"We suspect that bullfrogs are the main predator that hatchling turtles have to contend with," he said. "Largemouth bass will also eat small turtles."

The bigger a turtle grows, however, the less vulnerable it is to such predation.

"Once they get up to about three inches in length, we think they're pretty much bullfrog-proof," he said.

That theory will be tested using some of the turtles hatched in Beal's garage. Those animals will be taken to the E.E Wilson Wildlife Area north of Corvallis and raised in protected settings until they reach three inches.

Then some will be placed in waters with predators present, while the others will be placed in a protected pond. The survival rates of the two groups will be compared, with all survivors returned to Fern Ridge.

The biologists decided to launch the head-start effort after studying turtle nests near the reservoir.

"We found we were losing 100 percent of the nests to raccoon excavations," Beal said. So, in the spring of 1993, biologists began checking nestng areas every morning and placing wire "exclosures" over each nest dug the previous night.

That kept raccoons out, but none of the eggs hatched. Biologists suspected the tuurtles were nesting in an area where the ground was too wet, ruining the eggs.

To be sure there wasn't some problem with the eggs or the turtles laying them, they removed the eggs from half of the nests and placed them in incubators.

"From the looks of these turtles, the eggs are fine," said Beal. "They're hatching right on time. It may be that they've been nesting in habitat that's just too wet."

Another advantage of "head-starting" is that turtles can be grown much faster in captivity than in the wild, Castillo said.

"By raising these guys in ideal conditions for growth - with optimum temperatures and as much food as they can eat - you can put an amazing amount of growth on them in just a few months," Castillo said.

Young turtles normally emerge from their eggs about the time adult turtles are going into hibernation for the winter. They survive during the winter by drawing nutrients from a yolk sac that remains attached to their stomach after thay hatch.

But Beal's hatchlings won't hibernate this year. Kept under plenty of light and in warm temperatures, they can be kept awake all winter, feeding and growing.

If this year's crop of turtles do as well as hoped, the scale of the head start operation probably will be increased during the next several seasons.

But Beal and Castillo both say head-starting is merely a way to "buy time" to work on the larger problems of habitat loss and predator control.