73 Nests & Tropical Storms

As of June 7th we have 73 nests on our state park beach! We are off to a great start and are currently ahead of last year's record by this time.

We have our first public night walk tonight that we are excited for! I give a 45-minute presentation to 30 participants and then we walk our 1.5 mile beach looking for a nesting loggerhead sea turtle. I will update the blog tomorrow on how we made out!

This past weekend we had another tropical storm, Colin, hit us. It formed in the Gulf, so we mainly had a lot of rain. Unfortunately, we also had a King Tide hit us this weekend so a few of our nests are not too happy.

A nest can be washed over several times but too many wash overs will drown a nest. The tide created a pool on top of nest 4, but I am trying to stay positive that there will still be hatchlings that make it. I went for a walk during the highest tide on Saturday night and jotted down the nest numbers that had been washed over. We record this information into seaturtle.org, as well as notify DNR.

I am hoping that the tropical storms stay away for a little while!

We had a total of 5 nests that were washed over. Some were only a little bit, so they will be fine. A few had a pretty rough time with the water. When a sea turtle nests, we see if it is below or above the current high tide, if it is below then we move it. But if it is above, then we leave it. Unfortunately, you cannot predict what the weather will do to our beach.

Here are a couple photos of some washed over nests that I took while walking the beach at the highest tide: