The Turtle Journal team offers a treat just in time for Halloween. In fact, we offer you four years of treats from the files of the Terrapin Diary, one of the web’s first nature blogs created the same year that the term “blog” itself was coined and long before “blogging” had entered the public consciousness.Â
The Terrapin Diary began at the turn of the millennium as a collaboration between Don Lewis, the Turtle Guy, and Jim Van Abbema, The New York Turtle & Tortoise Society web master. This seminal partnership between rural Cape Cod and metropolitan New York started shortly after the discovery of a massive die-off of diamondback terrapins during the winter of 1999 – 2000 and was sparked by the 2nd plenary diamondback terrapin symposium at the Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, New Jersey in October 2000. The Terrapin Diary posted natural history entries continuously for the next four years of wildlife research, conservation and rescue.
Thanks to a reunion of that partnership, the Terrapin Diary has risen from the bit-bucket of digital history to be resurrected and mated with its successor, the Turtle Journal. The fully integrated Terrapin Diary – Turtle Journal now offers a decade of uninterrupted observations, illustrative stories, poignant anecdotes and scientific data about wildlife research, rescues and conservation along the Atlantic shoreline, with brief excursions into the Caribbean and other exotic ocean venues.
For a stroll through the Terrapin Diary, click on the cover page below or any of the hypertexted titles above. Although you may get lost in time as you burrow deeply into those enticing stories and compelling images, we hope you’ll return to Turtle Journal to see what’s happening in the here and now right outside your virtual window into the natural world that surrounds us.
Terrapin Diary Cover Page
Each of the Terrapin Diary entries from 2000 through 2003 have been integrated into the Turtle Journal index. If you’re looking for an event or a time period, click on the appropriate index on the right sidebar.
Brewster Beach at Sunset, December 2000
If you’re looking for a nice spot to begin your journey, we suggest “Shark Attack” from December 3rd, 2000 as an interesting nexus between the shark posting from this last weekend, “Yikes! 11-Foot Blue Shark in Wellfleet Bay,” and the beginning of the sea turtle cold-stunning season, “First Cold-Stunned Sea Turtle of 2008 Rescued.”
We close this entry with a profound thanks to Jim Van Abbema who saved the Terrapin Diary digital files for the last five years and personally uploaded the archival material into the Turtle Journal web site, so that we could make it accessible to you.