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Emily Votruba’s love of animals was sparked early, during childhood summers at her grandma’s cottage on Old Mission Peninsula.
She’d watch frogs in the nearby pond and worry about how ultraviolet radiation from the hole in the ozone would harm them.
But when she moved back to Michigan in 2010, she started thinking about turtles.
After living in New York City for over a decade, she wasn’t used to driving. Here, she was confronted with a lot of roadkill.
Roads across the country have diced up habitats, devastating animal populations and their ecosystems.
Driving on those roads, it can be almost impossible to avoid sprinting deer or scurrying squirrels. But turtles are, well, slow. And to Votruba, it seemed they were unnecessary casualties in the otherwise unavoidable collisions between cars and wildlife.
“I saw one right on [M-22] in the village that had just been run over in the middle of the road and was still there,” she said of a sighting a few years ago. “I'm pretty sure it was still alive. It had a cracked shell, was mostly crushed, but was not dead yet.”
In the village of Elberta, the speed limit is 30 miles per hour or less, but Votruba said people often go faster. And there are sections of Elberta’s roads that are especially dangerous, like a bend on M-22 near the Betsie Valley Trail.
“Coming around that corner, it would be so easy to just hurt a turtle (or) hurt a person who was trying to help them,” she said.
So Votruba got together with fellow county residents Mark and Carol Carlin to do something about it. The Carlins own The Elberta Mercantile Co. and are also DJs at the community radio station WUWU 100.1 FM.
Motivating them was “a combination of traffic safety and turtle safety coming together, and also being concerned about the people like us who like to help turtles,” she said.
The grassroots group held the first Turtlefest last year.
People made turtle crossing signs to post at key areas. They also worked with the Michigan Department of Transportation to install an official turtle crossing sign in that area. The signs go up at the start of turtle crossing season in the spring and come down around the end of July. The Portage Lake Watershed Association and the Benzie Conservation District have also put up signs at some key crossing locations.
Turtlefest 2025:
Turtlefest takes place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on May 24 at 654 Frankfort Ave. in downtown Elberta. You can expect sign painting, food for sale and more. It’s free to attend.
Michigan is home to 10 turtle species; three are threatened within the state according to the state Department of Natural Resources: the wood turtle, the spotted turtle, and the eastern box turtle. One — the Blanding’s turtle — is of special concern.
A recent DNR newsletter outlined the dangers of the road for these reptiles. Turtle eggs and young face high predation, but as they get older their survival rate increases drastically, so their conservation depends heavily on adult survival, wrote state fisheries biologist Tom Goniea.
Turtles are on the move in the spring and summer. Females look for nesting sites and males “just kind of wander this time of year,” Goniea wrote, asking drivers to slow down and keep an eye out for the reptilian travelers.
Since the signs went up last year, Votruba said, many people have told her they’re excited to see more awareness around the issue.
“I think a lot of people feel like they're the only one who cares,” she said, and knowing they’re not alone in that feeling is powerful. “If that message gets out there, then maybe it makes it safer for everyone who's interested in helping the turtles.”
How to help turtles
- Stay alert around bridge crossings and roads near water
- If you see a turtle in the road, slow down and try to avoid hitting it if it’s possible to do so safely
- If you decide to help a turtle cross the road and it’s safe to do so, move the turtle in the direction its head is pointing — it knows where it wants to go
- Be gentle with the turtle, don’t pick it up by its tail
- If a turtle is on the side of the road, make sure it’s not digging a nest for eggs before trying to move it
- Unless the turtle is in immediate danger, leave it alone
