With the helmet-shaped shell of a Blanding’s turtle, Brutus is fairly easy to distinguish from Carolina, an Eastern Box turtle. Her dome-like shell has a pattern designed to camouflage her on a forest floor.

But both were stolen from the wild by people who wanted them as pets. That’s illegal, because both species are endangered in Maine.

Brutus and Carolina came to live at the Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset after authorities confiscated them from Maine homes. Their time in captivity took away their ability to make it on their own.

Emma Balazs, a program assistant for Chewonki’s Traveling Natural History Program, discussed the turtles’ plight and showed them to a roomful of area families at the Wiscasset Public Library July 13.

In addition to individuals taking turtles as pets, Maine also has a history of problems with the illegal pet trade shipping countless turtles out of state, Balazs said. Sometimes they die in transport, but even the ones that survive the trip are no longer in Maine to help with the population.

Maine now has fewer than 1,000 Blanding’s turtles, all in York and Cumberland counties, Balazs said. Too few eastern box turtles have been spotted in Maine in recent years to even estimate a count for them, she said.

Balazs also touched on other negative human influences on wildlife, and some positive ones. Sea turtles eat plastic bags they mistake for jellyfish; whales can drown if weighed down by a net they’re dragging; pesticides once made the shells of eagles’ eggs so thin they broke when the adults sat on them.

But the eagle population has been coming back since the pesticide DDT was banned; puffins, which had dwindled in Maine for various reasons and are still considered threatened, have increased since some nests were brought in from Canada and people began protecting the birds from predators.

Among interesting turtle facts the audience heard: Some live a century or longer; sea turtles’ body parts are too big to pull inside their shells for protection, like other turtles can. Their defense is to try to swim away from the threat, Balazs said.