Had a great night walk last night. Delirious and exhausted at 5am, but 4 turtles came up! The first was on our end, and I performed her physical exam, measured crawl width, curved and straight carapace length, and we had to relocated her nest as she laid too close to the tide line so there was a danger of the waves washing out the nest. She had a massive deep laceration on her right front flipper that may have been from matuing or a boat slash. 92 yolked eggs, 32 yolkless. Next one came up, laid, and returned while we were working on the first. She laid her nest safely in the vegetation so we simply marked it, recorded GPS coordinates and continued monitoring.
Next one up on our end! Laid safely so didn't relocate. Final crawl was a false crawl, thankfully. She went straight for the illegal sand mine, which encroaches furher inland every week with no enforcement. There is a 14 foot drop at the site of mining, and her tracks went right up to it. My heart skipped a beat thinkning she had dropped off and wondering how in the hell we were going to get a 1200lbs dinosaur out of the pit. But she must have had a fin hit air and then turn around and head back out. She may have been one of the ones later on that simply showed up further down the shore.
First round of exams coming up this week - I'm going to rock them!
bye for now
~lkc
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