My Favorite Moments as a Sea Turtle Intern

Blog Post By: Aidan, Sea Turtle Intern

​        For my final blog post, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite moments during nesting season. I really enjoyed my time at Edisto Beach interning with the state park and working with all the great volunteers.
        On our June 15th dawn patrol, we saw a nesting turtle still ashore to our surprise at 6:20 am. She finished up covering and disguising her nest before returning to sea. I was excited to see my first daylight loggerhead turtle.
         On a nice rainy morning, we had the second evidence of our “crazy turtle”. This time it was a pile of body pits over a vast area of sand. This spot would become known as possible nest 4 (PN4). We probed the area for possible eggs for almost an hour as the skies unleashed a downpour on us. The best part about that is we could still see our probe marks in the sand over a month later. Ironically, the same turtle came up the next day and dug eight more body pits in the same area without nesting.

The same turtle digging another eight body pits and going through possible nest 4

​           We had a special surprise on our July 17th night walk with two nesting sea turtles within minutes of entering the beach. After hearing that there was a nesting turtle near the pavilion to the right of the beach access, we walked out below the high tide line. Directly to the left, there was another turtle emerging out the ocean. While the commotion of some onlookers did not stop the turtle, she did false crawl after making her way up the beach. However, we were not too upset as we knew we would have another turtle to watch momentarily.
         On the July 21st night walk, we got to see two nests boil. The second boil had around 100 hatchlings making it a spectacular sight to see. There were so many it looked as if the ground was moving in front of us!