Sunday, December 24th - Happy Holidays to all

 Wishing you all a healthy, joyous holiday to those who are staying in town and safe travels to those who are traveling.  Enjoy your family and friends during this special time of the year.

Warm wishes - Leslie

Saturday, December 23 - Posting from the SC Sea Turtle Volunteer Network

 Just in case your missed the Facebook Posting, I thought to copy to our blog.  At the end of the year I am asked to write up an exciting event which happened on our on beach, I selected the Friday's Volunteers encounter with the mama turtle.  It was recently posted on the Sea Turtle Volunteer Network.

Many thanks to Kim T who wrote the original posting.  I "borrowed" much of her summary and added some information to it.

Leslie

=========================================== 

It's time for another season highlight! This time we are visiting the northern-most barrier island of South Carolina, Waties Island:
"On June 16th the Friday volunteers headed up the beach at the start of this brand-new day. We were full of hope that our nest drought would end today. Little did we know that hope turned into reality... and then some.
 
We received a text stating the magic word 'TURTLE' from one of our volunteers who is always 200 feet in front of the rest of us (she's a very fast walker). We hightailed it up the beach in time to see momma just finishing up, throwing sand over her nest. Then, she was heading toward the ocean. We watched and followed her in awe as she made her return trip to the water. She was big and she was beautiful.
One of our volunteers did manage to get some measurements of her carapace and we were able to note that there were no tags or tag scars. She was quite tolerant of the activities of her admirers. With one last look, she bid us adieu.
 
After the initial fun and excitement, we had some work to do. We covered the rest of the beach before we set our sights on the nest. Because the nest was just at the wrack line from last week's high tides, we decided to relocate her 147 eggs higher up on the dune.
 
A true group effort... we now had nest 2R in the books. A morning the Friday volunteers will not soon forget.
 
To complete this story, this nests emerged on August 11th on day 56. This was one of our successful nests with a 76.6% hatch success, 61.3% emergence success." - Leslie Piwowarczyk, MTP500