Night Walk 7/20 - A SUCCESS!

We were thankful that we were still able to conduct the walk portion of the program on Thursday as earlier on in the day it showed thunderstorm arriving right around 9pm. The initial radar when we went out onto the beach showed that a storm would not arrived until 1am, so we excitedly headed out, with the hopes of witnessing a nesting sea turtle.

We came across a turtle ashore not too far down the beach. This turtle was almost done covering when we saw her though and she quickly slipped into the high tide.

A little further down and all of a sudden the group reported a sea turtle emerging, right in the middle of our group. We proceeded to turn off our lights and split ways to. create a path for it to crawl ashore. Thankfully, by standing still and without any lights, the turtle continued crawling up above the high tide line. 

After checking the radar and seeing the storm was set to move in around midnight, we figured it was best to let this turtle continue nesting and head back to the office building. Besides, we all got an up close encounter and saw her through the night vision monoculars. However, on the way back, when we were almost back to the building, a storm cell popped up and completely soaked us all. Thankfully, with that exciting turtle encounter we were all in great spirits!

The following morning, the dawn patrol team documented three new nests and two false crawls. The second turtle we witnessed during our program is marked as nest 271 on the state park beach!