Nest 100 - hatched and inventoried!

Look at all the hatchling tracks!

Our nest 100 hatched with only 49 days of incubation! It must have gotten pretty warm to have incubated the eggs that quickly. This nest hatched on August 16th and we performed the inventory on August 19th. We wait 3-5 days to inventory a nest as there may be stragglers that emerge the following nights. Waiting 3 days ensures that any hatchlings that are still able, can make it out on their own at night. This gives them the best chance at surviving. Hatchlings have about a 1 in a 1000 chance to survive to adulthood, so the road ahead of the little ones is a tough one.

You can see in the above photo that we used washed up cord grass to create a light barrier for this nest. Hatchlings go towards the brightest point, which should naturally be the horizon but if a light is left on a house, they may go towards that instead. You can see many nests on our beach with cordgrass to ensure our hatchlings go in the right direction - to the OCEAN!

This nest had a great success rate. There were 105 hatched eggs, 8 unhatched eggs and 7 alive hatchlings found. This gives it a hatch rate of: 92.1% & an emerge rate of: 85.9%.

See below for some pictures taken from the inventory.