Thursday 6/15 Morning Patrol

We had a fun morning on the 15th! I was on patrol with Sherry and one of our new volunteers, Kelly. She was eager to learn about what we do to help protect our nests here on the beach.

We had quite the morning - we had four nests and one false crawl. The first nest was very straight forward and it was easy to find the eggs. 

Kelly with her first nest as an EBSP turtle volunteer!

As we were driving down to look for more tracks, Kelly asked if the turtles know to avoid the other nests. I explained how last year we had one turtle take out another nest and lay her eggs a couple feet from the other. Well, as we were pulling up to a set of new tracks we saw this turtle did the same thing!

She completely knocked over nest 37

She had plowed through nest 37 to lay her eggs. So we needed to find both the old egg chamber of 37 and the new egg chamber. They were only a couple feet apart so we protected them with two screens.

Our third nest was below the high tide line so we needed to relocate it. The false crawl had somewhat of a body pit so we spent a good amount of time probing and digging but did not come across any eggs. The last nest was way around the inlet!

Kelly had a busy morning patrol but she loved every minute of it. I think she's caught the turtle fever! See below for photos from our nests: