By Josh Einiger-July 12, 2016
11:32PM
JAMAICA, Queens (WABC-TV) -- Why
would a bunch of turtles leave their comfortable swampland around Jamaica Bay,
and wander onto a busy runway at JFK Airport?
Video of turtles laying eggs at
JFK
They've been using the runway to
lay their eggs for several years, and in the process changing takeoffs and
landings at the nation's fifth busiest airport.
It is peak departure time at
Kennedy Airport with thousands bound for faraway places, and their planes
thundering down the runway and into the air.
But at JFK this time of year,
those jets aren't the only things on the move.
"I'm terrible at identifying
aircraft. I know about three or four and that's it," said Laura Francoeur,
PANYNJ Chief Wildlife Biologist.
It's Francoeur's job to keep the
animals away from the airplanes at Port Authority airports.
"How many birds can you identify?"
Eyewitness News asked.
"A lot," Francoeur
said.
Tuesday she and her team were on
the hunt for turtles.
Every July, dozens of diamondback
terrapin turtles hike out of the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay and make their
nests at the end of the runway, which juts into the Bay, basically, right in
their path.
"We have a lot of sandy
nesting soil, the airport was built on fill, we're right next to a salt marsh,
so it's an ideal habitat for them, so it's sort of natural to them, but very
unnatural from our perspective," Francoeur said.
One turtle decided to lay her
eggs in the safety zone of Runway 4Left at JFK, and that is not a good thing if
you're sitting on a plane.
Because for obvious safety
reasons, a plane can't take off with a turtle is in its way.
And starting in 2009, out of the
blue, dozens of turtles began making their homes there; prompting delays so
bad, JetBlue at the time tweeted about it! "#Cantmakethisup."
"Why do they come here
versus going anywhere else? That's more of the unknown that we're trying to
figure out," said Melissa Zostant, a terrapin researcher.
Since then, Zostant, a Hofstra
student, has helped research the terrapins' behavior.
She has been inserting microchips
to track their movements, as the airport has installed with plastic drain
tubing that's been successful at keeping many of them out, but not all of them.
As for the nests, Zostant builds
cages around them to keep predators out. When the eggs hatch, the babies find
their own way out, and into the marsh.
"I think it would be
virtually impossible to get them to nest anyplace else," Francoeur said.
For now, everyone's getting where
they need to go. Including the new turtle mother, released through the fence to
find her way home.
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