The morning started up nice and cool. Different story by the time we were done, we were quite sweaty.
N02R emerged on day 59 with tracks going everywhere. We checked all the vegetation around several times to make sure that no hatchlings had gotten stuck.
As the nesting part of the season starts to come to an end, the teams on Waties divide up so that the beach near the dunes, in the middle, and near the shore are covered for undetected nests. An undetected nest can be found in several ways. Sometimes there will be a large number of ghost crab holes in one spot up in the dune. Other times, hatchling tracks may lead to the ocean, even though there is no apparent nest in the area.
As Claudia and Jewel were walking up the beach, Claudia noticed three large crab holes up in the dune. When Jewel looked to the left, she small pieces of egg shells lying on the sand. Turtles have to be there somewhere. They called me, and when I got there, I looked at my list of false crawls and saw that there had been a few in this area.
I picked out a spot, and down the probe went. I even said, “Don’t get excited. It’s probably just a ghost crab hole.” Well, when Jewel started to remove the sand, she found more tiny pieces of shell. She continued digging farther down, and all of a sudden, to the right of the hole, were the rear flippers of a hatchling.
At first, she thought it was dead, but then it moved. At that point, I checked with Leslie, and since we could not tell if it still had its yolk sac attached, we gently covered it back up. We placed the triangulation poles and put the cage on the nest.
Front row Claudia, Jewel, Sherry. Back row Donna,Debbie
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