Night Walk 6/22 - A SUCCESS!

We had a very eventful night walk on Tuesday! Following our presentation and walking onto the beach, we could see how busy the beach was with beachgoers. I came across one family that had attended our night walk program the week before. They mentioned they saw a group run to an emerging turtle causing her to false crawl. This is why we stress keeping 20-30ft from a nesting turtle to ensure she does not get spooked and continues to nest.

Then I got word that a turtle was up and was laying eggs by multiple groups. When I arrived she had just started to cover. Our night walk group got to watch her finish the covering process and then head back into the ocean. She came up at low tide so she had a long and tiring crawl back. A few participants even got to witness when she resurfaced to take a breath of air once back in the ocean.

We started our walk back to the WIFI room as we had our turtle sighting of the evening. When I arrived back to the white building, there were tracks leading up the beach. We had another turtle ashore! This time she was digging her egg chamber so we patiently waited until she was laying her eggs.

It was a turtley fun night walk! The first turtle we saw is marked as nest 110 on our beach. The second turtle we saw was the first nest we came across this morning, so it is marked as nest 107. Both nests were above the high tide line so no relocation was needed. 

We found 4 new nests and 1 false crawl in the morning. We also recorded the 2 short U-turn false crawls that we witnessed during our walk. See below for pictures taken from our morning patrol!