It was a gorgeous July day in Muir Woods National Monument when Turtle #9 began his rise to fame.
Sunlight, beaming down through the tree canopy and seeping into Redwood Creek, drew him out to bask on a logjam. A park volunteer, Charlotte Johnston, on a rove through the old-growth coast redwoods, spotted him there. Johnston almost didn’t believe it at first—in her five years of volunteering, she had never seen a western pond turtle in Muir Woods. In fact, nobody had in about 30 years.
Northwestern pond turtles are one of two remaining native freshwater turtles in California, where it is listed as a species of special concern. These omnivores will eat almost anything, as long as it’s in the water, and can live up to 50 years. And usually they stick within a small home range, but occasionally an intrepid traveler will travel miles and may even cross watersheds.
Turtle #9 was just such a fellow, wending five miles over two months on his two-inch legs up Redwood Creek. His excursion had begun downstream in the freshwater lagoon fed by the same creek where it empties into the Pacific at Muir Beach, a national park site. He was released there on August 22, 2017, an early explorer, in the first group of western pond turtles that were introduced to the lagoon through 2021 to reestablish the extirpated population. Turtle #9 was hatched from salvaged eggs after his mother was hit by a car in San Rafael. He was raised with other baby turtles for a couple years at the San Francisco Zoo before being released, in the hope that bigger and bulked-up hatchlings would more likely survive predators.
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Our wayfarer apparently traveled alone, wandering from his clan for reasons unknown. He ambled up the creek into Muir Woods until about a half mile into the park, just upstream of pedestrian Bridge 3. There, he found an oasis: a jumbled mass of fallen trees, branches, and debris, shoved together by Redwood Creek, spanning bank to bank. The creek plunges rapidly underneath the wood jam and exits silently from the other side. Over time, the creek has scoured out a five-foot deep pool in the midst of the masses of twigs and branches. Here the water moves slowly, beckoning juvenile coho salmon in need of shelter from predators and currents while they grow large enough to swim out to sea. Apparently, it also called to a traveling turtle on the hunt for crayfish and a pocket of sunshine.
And perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him there.
The logjam at Bridge 3, its pool, the freshwater wetlands at Muir Beach, and the turtle release all resulted from the National Park Service’s major restorations of Redwood Creek that began in 2003 and concluded in 2023, all together costing upward of $16 million, according to Carolyn Shoulders, the National Park Service (NPS) natural resources project manager for the restorations in Muir Beach and Woods. Driven largely by salmon habitat loss, the two decades of work wrapped up between July and November 2023. And Turtle #9 had arrived in a restored stretch of Redwood Creek just as the final phase in Muir Woods was about to begin.
The creek hasn’t always gotten this much love. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps protected trails following the creek through Muir Woods by building boulders, called riprap, into the creek banks. Additionally, the NPS removed logs from the creek through most of the 20th century, resulting in a homogeneous, faster-moving channel with a flattened-out bed. It made for a clean-looking creek, but a hostile environment for many of its inhabitants.
Restoration started to address this misguided management history in 2019 upstream of Bridge 3 in Muir Woods, and the final phase was beginning imminently. Heavy equipment was rolling in about 1,000 feet downstream of where the NPS restoration team had spotted Turtle #9 just days earlier, and we were preparing to reroute the creek’s water through corrugated plastic pipes during the work.
The NPS aquatic ecologist wanted to refresh the radio tag attached to the turtle’s shell to keep track of him. As NPS aquatics and hydrology interns, Matt Millado and I, equipped with waders and canned sardines, set minnow traps around the Bridge 3 logjam to lure in Turtle #9. The aquatic ecologist tagged and sent him back into the pool—a decision quickly regretted.
Our problems began a week later when a colleague and I saw Turtle #9 sunning on a gravel bar where heavy-equipment work was about to start. (We almost missed him; western pond turtles can look remarkably like cobbles.) With the discovery came a daunting realization—Turtle #9 was not only on the move, but he could circumnavigate the wire-mesh fences across the creek intended to stop wildlife from entering construction zones.
The restoration was picking up pace. Excavators coaxed boulders from the banks, unwieldy logs were placed in the creek with delicate precision, and NPS biomonitors rushed around measuring water quality and moving California giant salamanders out of harm’s way. Everyone on site juggled several responsibilities, and the prospect of a well-camouflaged special-status traveler was a stressful addition. Outfitted with telemetry gear, Millado scanned for Turtle #9’s radio signal up and down Redwood Creek, but our elusive reptile remained at large. We kept our eyes peeled and prayed for a signal.
For a month, Millado didn’t detect Turtle #9, but in late August, a friend revealed himself downstream from the Bridge 3 logjam. Turtle #1, too, had been released, as a four-inch-long juvenile, at Muir Beach in summer 2017. The reintroduction had followed the NPS’s restoration at Muir Beach from 2009 to 2013 that brought back wetlands and the channel, planted native species like willows, and created areas of slow-moving water that turtles and juvenile fish like.
All 42 turtles released at Muir Beach have been tracked for six years via radio tags to help the NPS understand their survival, behaviors, and the locations they’re drawn to. But nobody had anticipated they would enjoy spending summer months in the well-shaded redwood groves of Muir Woods, or that they would even travel so far. Turtles #1 and #9 demonstrated their inclinations for exploration, but the decision to swim in the deep pool at Muir Woods made another statement: restoration at both the downstream and upstream ends of Redwood Creek were successfully expanding the aquatic community’s habitat.
This time, Turtle #1 was captured, retagged, and moved out of danger, back to his home turf at Muir Beach. The restoration within Muir Woods pushed forward, creating new pools and wood jams that better support juvenile coho salmon. The final buckets of cobble were laid in November, pipes and pumps removed and fences taken down. The search for Turtle #9 continued, if only to refuse acknowledgment of our worst fears.
Finally, in a last-ditch effort in December, Millado again lugged out the antenna to search for the missing wanderer. After finding nothing in Muir Woods, he set up at a pullout on the road to Muir Beach and turned the dial to Turtle #9’s channel. After a few seconds of static, the radio signal came in, a barely audible blip, and the turtle tension in our shoulders released. Millado followed the signal along the road and down the creek bank, chasing the intermittent beep as it grew in volume and confidence. Our itinerant turtle’s signal was strong in a stretch of Redwood Creek between Muir Woods and Muir Beach—against all odds, he had bypassed the construction zone’s many hurdles. If he or any of his community make the journey to Muir Woods again, they will be met with a more welcoming habitat.
