New Nest - July is HOT !!

Nest #3 this morning - a great way to start the day. After such a long stretch of not much activity, now two nests in three days and hopefully more to come.

This was a smaller turtle - the track width was only 28 inches - but she's a climber. Up on top of the dunes between Marker 5 and 6 she laid her nest. Because of all the sea oats up there, it wasn't obvious where the nest was, but we found it after probing for a while.

Long crawl up the beach . . .

and than crawled up the dune

Her nest, in the sea oats

Bob and Sandy offering support

 

Probing is hard work

Looking, looking, looking 

Paulette finds soft sand and the egg cavity

High and dry - no washovers up there

Leslie, Bob, Sandy, and Paulette

Thanks too to the rest of the Monday team who weren't able to stay this morning - Sherry, Donna, Kim and Maddy. Great job everyone!  Barb

FINALLY!! A New Nest

Beautiful morning, nice gentle breezes and a very welcome surprise: a crawl between Marker 8 and 9

She crawled up to the wall and turned right for a short distance before digging her nest.

Took a lot of probing though; the actual nest cavity was at the far edge of the circle - almost outside it. Not where we expected to find it.

This turtle isn't very big: her track width measured 30 to 32" wide and she seems to have a barnacle or growth on her plastron which makes the drag mark in the middle of her tracks.

A lot of digging and Jeanne was just able to reach the egg for the DNA sample. It was pretty deep!

Nest #2 DNA sample

This one won't hatch until mid-September

Steve, Jeanne and Pat - nice shirts!

False Crawl #6

At the beginning of our walk, just before MM4 and our first nest, we spotted a crawl and what looked like a nest,

We called Dave and Keela to let them know and then made a call to Barb and Steve and continued to make our way to the top of the island.

Lo and behold, the turtle tracks weren't the only tracks we found on the beach.  Further up the beach we found a pair of critter tracks.

Back to the nest...we determined the in-coming and out-going track and measured the width at 30".

The site looked good for a nest.  We probed and probed, dug and dug, but no eggs and we reluctantly marked it FC #6.

False crawl # 4

This morning's walkers found a set of tracks at the upper end of the Island, just past Marker 9. Even though there was a hole found, no nest cavity was located. It was hypothesized that she dug the hole a little bit, but stopped because the sand was too dense to continue digging.

False Crawl #3 was discovered on Tuesday, June 9
near the site of Nest #1, between marker 2 and 3

False Crawl 2

This morning we discovered our 2nd false crawl of the season above Marker 4. These tracks could have easily been missed if we were not walking near the high tide line!

Nest #1 gentle high tide washovers occurred on
June 5 and June 6