Night Walk 7/6 - A Success!

We had a long night walk as we went all the way to the inlet with no turtle activity. On the way back from the inlet and less than half a mile back to the start of the walk there was a turtle making her crawl up from the ocean. 

We waited patiently as she created her body pit and dug her egg chamber. Once she had started to lay her eggs we got a closer look. She was the largest sea turtle we have seen on a night walk this year. Her carapace measured 43 inches long and 41 inches wide. She even had part of her carapace missing by her rear left flipper from an old injury of some sort (possibly tiger shark!). By the time we made it back to the start it was nearing 1:30 a.m. but everyone was excited to have seen a turtle.

The next morning we marked this nest as 126 on our state park beach! We had 3 nests and 1 false crawl. If you would like to adopt this nest, click the button below to be taken to the adoption page. The unique ID to adopt it is: 204656. 

Adopt The Nest

The next morning we also saw that a nest hatched last night! This means we will be having our public nest inventory on Wednesday evening at 6:30 p.m. at our state park. We meet at the white office building in our Day Use area. You can call our learning center for more information. Look at all the hatchling tracks in the photo below!

Check out more pictures taken of nest 126 during the morning patrol!