For months, a group of Exploris Middle School students have been trying to answer a scientific question -- Where's Waldo? Waldo is an eastern box turtle who nearly died crossing Hillsborough Street near the State Fairgrounds. After being rehabilitated at a wildlife center, he now lives in the N.C. State University Centennial Campus woods near Lake Raleigh. Each week, a group of students sets out to find him.

The students have been collaborating with wildlife educators at the Centennial Wildlife Center to track the eastern box turtle population in the 90-plus-acre forest.

"We're trying to get a handle on what the box turtle populations are in undisturbed sites," said Kimberly Burge, a wildlife educator with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. "Lake Raleigh woods is our study area. It's one of the last undisturbed areas within the beltline of substantial size."

The tracking project, one of 12 in the state, is part of a large statewide effort called the Box Turtle Collaborative. It involves researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Davidson College, the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences and several other state agencies. They're in the early stages of trying to get an idea of the population of box turtles in the wild.

Some scientists, including Ann Somers, a biologist at UNC-Greensboro, think that the reptiles are in decline because habitats have been fragmented or lost. But there is not much baseline data about the box turtle population.

"We're optimistic it will be a project that will yield information that will be of value," said Somers, chairwoman of the Box Turtle Collaborative. "There is this deep connection people have with turtles."

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Hana Zevgolis, 12, a sixth-grader at Exploris, carried radiotelemetry equipment that emits static and chirps as she walks through the woods. Waldo the turtle has a thumb-sized transmitter glued to its shell that the receiver picks up within a range of about a half mile. The chirps get louder as the young researcher gets closer.

"We're triangulating on him," Burge said as Hana swept the antennae attached to the radio receiver in a circle to check where the signal was strongest. "You're getting a loud signal everywhere, which means you're close."

Soon, another group of students who took a different path as they followed radiotelemetry signals emerged onto the trail near the same spot -- a creek. The students searched around the creek until they found the turtle.

"I think this is pretty cool," Hana said. "If we get into this profession when we're older, it will help us. It lets us have new experiences."

Remembering Dan

The students have found three turtles in the woods so far. They measure them, attach a radio transmitter to their shells and release them. One, nicknamed Dan for the student who found him last fall, was later found dead near the site of ongoing road construction to extend Main Campus Drive.

The students, upset by Dan's death, became inspired to understand how roads and development affect the habitats of box turtles.

"I think they got the real experience through that activity," said Juliana Thomas, a sixth-grade science teacher at Exploris. "They saw how Dan was killed. They are learning through that and knowing that we humans are impacting our environment and influencing populations to diminish."

Part of the aim of gathering the data is to better understand how much land turtles need.

"This is the first year we have done this," Thomas said. "We plan to continue this next year."