The Turtle Women of Barrington

        As soon as the sun comes up, rare tutrtles begin to arrive at a sandy bluff overlooking Hundred Acre Cove in Barrington. Two emerge simultaneously from the forest edge and wander around looking for the perfect nesting site. Three more appear in an adjacent field and quickly begin digging five-inch-deep holes in which to deposit their eggs.
           The diminutive turtles, called diamondback terrapins, kick sand over themselves to camouflage their appearance, then dig a flask-shaped nest with their hind feet. When the hole is the right size, each turtle lays about fifteen eggs, covers them with sand and departs. The whole process takes about twenty minutes.
        Hidden nearby in a small grove of trees they call the office, a team of volunteers and biologists — nearly all of them women — watch until the turtles are finished laying and begin to return to the marsh below. But before the terrapins can escape, the volunteers collect each one for processing, which

Diamondback terrapin (Todd McLeish)

involves measuring their shell, marking them so they can be recognized later and, in some cases, tagging them for future research. The turtles are then released to return to the cove. Each nest site is also flagged and covered with an exclosure, a wire basket-like device to keep predators from accessing the eggs. One of the terrapins collected on this June day was first identified in 1990, the first year of this monitoring effort, making her more than thirty years old.
        Overseeing this complex project is Kathryn Beauchamp, seventy-three, a retired nurse who spent most of her life caring for children in the intensive care units of hospitals in Providence, Boston and a half-dozen other cities around the country. With a few kind words, she instructs new volunteers about the procedures, encourages visiting students to participate, educates unwitting walkers who traipse through the site oblivious to the terrapins, and answers questions with a pleasant smile. When a terrapin is brought to the office, she demonstrates proper turtle-handling technique and walks newcomers through the processing steps so they can learn to do it themselves. Despite directing the operation with military precision, her tone is always welcoming. No one is ever left out.
        “My friends jokingly say that I transferred my love of taking care of children to taking care of turtles,” says Beauchamp. “I’ve always been very interested in nature, birds and gardening, and this seemed to fit right in. Once you get involved, it’s so heartwarming to see everyone working together to protect this turtle.”
        Beauchamp started volunteering on the terrapin project in the spring of 2017, just a few months after her retirement, and within two years she was transitioning into a leadership role.
        “It’s all about maintaining this species in Hundred Acre Cove,” she says. “With climate change, we’re watching the cove change. The islands of the marsh are slowly breaking apart and shrinking with the higher and higher tides, and the turtles need that marsh.”
        Named for the diamond pattern on their shell, diamondback terrapins were discovered nesting at Hundred Acre Cove in the 1980s after not...

        Read the rest of the story in the June 2021 issue of Rhode Island Monthly.