Night Walk 6/15 - No Turtles Seen

With a severe thunderstorm watch for our area, we were worried we would have to cancel our program. We continued on with the presentation part of our program and then rechecked the various weather apps to try to determine what the storms were doing. We waited for 15 minutes under shelter as the lightning continued to get further and further away. I did a check to the south end of our beach to search for any turtle activity. At one point, I thought I saw a shadow up ahead but it happened to be an old knocked down sandcastle. While crouching, I lost my phone out of my pocket! I tried not to stress too much about it as the walk must go on! And thankfully one participant in our group located my phone!

After we started our walk down the beach, I came across turtle tracks. However, I saw both the incoming and the outgoing set of tracks. This turtle did not successfully nest and had just left a short while ago. We continued down the beach when another bright flash lit up the dark night. Another cell of the storm had popped up a bit closer, so we turned around and ended our walk.

The following morning only three false crawls were seen! So even if we would have been able to continue the walk, no nesting turtle would have been witnessed. The one false crawl had an abandoned egg chamber, so she tried but must have hit some tough shells. I have included a few photos taken from this morning.

Thank you to our night walk group for their positivity and understanding when we had to cut our walk short!