Day AND Night Turtle Patrols
….are taking a lot out of me. I’m getting too old to run two businesses, two houses with yards, take care of ten dogs, a cat, a husband and myself in addition to doing 12-20 hours of turtle work! But someone’s gotta do it. We really need to win the lottery soon so we can hire some help…..
During Sunday night’s patrol, we had 3 turtles come up, two of which laid eggs. No flipper tags on any of them, so we are naming them by their markings, size or behavior since we are not able to tag as yet. One has a deep notch in her left rear scute (Notch girl), another has an inverted “v” shape at her tail scute (Miss V) and one is small, very inexperienced, and we think has dug a series of pits at the surf line under the steep berm between stakes 25 and 35 (Grenade girl).
We went again on Monday night because last week-end there were 17 activities between Friday and Sunday, so we wanted to see what else would happen. We borrowed a PIT scanner from TNC because we were told that one season a while back one of the interns couldn’t flipper tag, so she only PIT tagged the turtles she had contact with. We had at least one turtle come up (we call her “Double Wide”) because she’s really wide – she’s fast too, and almost bowled Michael over and down the berm.
Anyway, on our first pass down the beach, we saw an activity that we weren’t sure about. It could have been a lay, but it was dark, so we decided to finish the pass to the end and see if she had come up farther down and laid. We saw a truck idling in the west campground area, walked down to the breakwater, and sat until it was time to head back. When we got to where we saw the truck, the guys were on the beach fishing. We spoke to them and they said that they had just seen a big turtle try to come up out of the surf, but she got spooked by them and went back into the sea. They thought they should pack up and let her come back to “do her thing” – very nice and very commendable (besides, there was lightning all around), so they reeled in their lines and left.
We made a note of the turtle activity that we had seen earlier and went back to our beginning point, sat until it was time to patrol again and headed west once more. This time, when we came upon the area of that activity, we saw a turtle coming up from Grenade girl’s area 10-15m past stake 32. We stopped and watched her laboriously climb up the berm. She started to body pit and after a few minutes we saw another shape in the surf where she had just come up (was it her or another turtle?) It was her, she had fallen down the berm. So she struggled up again and started to body pit. After about an hour, she started to dig. Finally, around 11, she hit roots and started to leave. Michael got close enough to try to scan for a PIT tag, but she bolted down the berm like a bat out of hell. He has a pretty good bump on his leg as a reminder of her.
By then we were exhausted and went home. Tuesday morning’s patrol showed that she came back up to that same spot and possibly laid.