About the same time, another person, who authorities believed was Ng’s husband, was paddling toward her from the Canadian side.

When agents inspected Ng’s duffel bag, they found it contained socks that were moving around.

Inside were 29 individually wrapped eastern box turtles, a protected species found from Maine to Texas and listed as vulnerable due to the illegal pet trade and other threats, according to the nonprofit Turtle Survival Alliance.

Laws on keeping the species as a pet vary by state, but it is always illegal to transport them abroad without proper permits.

Ng pleaded guilty to one smuggling charge in U.S. District Court in Vermont on Friday. She will be sentenced in December. Her attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday.

Ng is a citizen of China who had been living in Canada and entered the United States on a tourist visa, according to officials. She is from Hong Kong, where the turtles would have been eventually sold, officials said after reading her cellphone communications. Turtles with colorful markings are prized in the domestic and foreign pet trade market, the Justice Department said, particularly in China and Hong Kong.

The United States is a leading origin point for the legal and illegal trade in turtles, Jennifer Sevin, director of biological instruction at the University of Richmond, wrote last year on academic news site The Conversation.

At least 24,000 freshwater turtles sourced from the United States were intercepted in the illegal trade between 1998 and 2021, according to a University of Michigan-led analysis published last year.

Last April, a Virginia man admitted capturing wild eastern box turtles and selling them on Facebook. In 2020 a Chinese national was extradited from Malaysia after involvement in what U.S. authorities said was a $2.2 million turtle smuggling scheme. In 2014, a Canadian man even tried to smuggle 51 live turtles out of the United States stuffed inside his pants, prosecutors said.

Ng came to the attention of law enforcement after repeatedly renting an Airbnb near Lake Wallace, an area known for smuggling activity, during the tourist off-season, a Border Patrol agent told the court in an affidavit.

Her husband had also previously rented an Airbnb directly opposite hers on the lake, investigations suggested.

Ng’s cellphone content and rental car GPS data suggested the turtles were obtained in New Jersey.

Ng agreed to pay $3,480 to cover costs of caring for the seized turtles during the case. It was not immediately clear what would happen to them. Turtles confiscated by law enforcement are frequently sent to zoos and aquariums, according to a 2022 report by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff and other experts.

The authors noted agencies had a limited capacity to “house them, screen them for disease, determine their origin and repatriate them back into the wild.”