City destroyed turtle nests, Unity Road resident says
A concerned Kingston citizen has called out the city for grading road shoulders in a turtle nesting area.
Rick Jeffries was returning from his daily run when he noticed that a stretch of Unity Road near his house had been graded and rolled by a City of Kingston road maintenance crew.
To most, nothing would seem awry about the circumstances, but the smoothed gravel shoulder raised red flags for Jeffries.
Jeffries’ house sits on the edge of a wetland on Unity Road, and the shoulder of the road is a popular turtle nesting ground for several species of turtles.
“We see turtles coming out to nest,” Jeffries said during an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of turtle nests here that have probably been scraped out and destroyed.”
The grading didn’t alarm him at first, but then he noticed an untouched stretch near the wetland guardrail. In that area, Jeffries saw several telltale signs of turtle nests in the sandy, gravelled shoulder on both sides of the road.
“I stopped for a second thinking, ‘My goodness, if there are this many turtle nests in this stretch of road here, there are so many more that have just been graded,’” he said. “That has got to be so many nests that were destroyed.”
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Photo from Meghan Balogh/The Whig-Standard.
