Was found Sunday morning 8/09/09 by Cathy Felty, near nest 5 at Paradise by the Sea. Those girls keep on coming!
Found by Bill Higgins. This is his first one this year….yeah! Just west of Mistral. Loggerhead found 8/08/09 All of nests this year are Loggerheads.
UPDATE!!
As nest #37 hatched something got into it, Val has seen a red fox in the area. Anyone tell what this is by the prints? There were 93 eggs in this nest, we found 3 dead hatchlings and I found a hatchling track about 5 houses from nest, I am sure did not live. 4 no obvious were found.
nest 37 predator (1)
Charlie found this nest while he was nest sitting between nest 4 and 5. He went to check on nest 5, came back to nest 4 and saw the crawl……at 1am.
Notice the nice way he marked it so Al would see it on his walk.
Notice the hole this girl had to navigate on her way out. She fell right into it.
UPDATE!!
Nest #36
70 escaped from nest
1 piped
3 no obvious
Nest #35 was found on Sunday 8/02/09 by John Andrews a loggerhead in Inlet Beach…Way to go John!
Quite a day for Anthony and Sherry, first thing on the beach the morning, they come upon a Loggerhead just laying her eggs, OK Charlie beat that. This was in the Stallworth Area and after they got down watching they walked on and found her false crawl from earlier. Same turtle. What an experience. Anthony has burned the video and it will be on Walton Outdoors, our site and hopefully Kate can put it on Facebook also. What a great year this is, As Jennifer always says “TURTLE POWER”.
UPDATE!!
Nest #34
Escaped 69
Alive and released 2
No obvious 8
Total eggs 79
Success 99 %
False Crawl #19 was found 8/02/09 a loggerhead in the Stallworth Area by Anthony and Sherry
Nest #33 from this morning. April found the nest. Turtle came up between a towel and buckets/toys on the beach. The sand was saturated from a storm surf but the turtle nested anyway and left having to turn West to avoid two beach chairs left in the surf.
Had to move the nest due to being quite a ways below the high tide line. Digging the nest was extremely exhausting as the sand was liquid to try to dig through and the eggs were trapped beneath ground and under water. The hole kept sloughing and widening like a huge bowl of malt-o-meal. There was no shape to the nest cavity at all.
The only way we could find eggs was to push our hand deep into the sand and come up through the bottom of the nest and watery sand and sift the eggs out of the sand on the way up. Recovered 107 very pink eggs and moved them up as far as the sea walls would allow. The eggs are 2 to 3 feet higher now than they were. We could have gone higher to move them alongside the public access, but the sand at that location is not beach sand, but a tan colored more coarse almost gravel material and we weren’t taking a chance on how that might affect egg development.
UPDATE!!
I want to say thanks to Buz, Susan, April and Debbie (I don’t have her email address) for helping with the dig tonight. The success rate was much lower than we had hoped. Though we had more than we wanted of dead embryos and infertile eggs, those that we found live were healthy and strong and made it to the water and are on their way to their big journey. Bud and Susan came down a little earlier and raked a clear track for the hatchlings. April and Debbie were there to help with the dig and release as well. Susan helped with the release and did the paperwork for us. We had about 6-7 spectators who were all very interested and so excited about the experience. The results of nest 33 are:
Escaped: 55
Alive and released: 13
Live pipped 1
No Obvious: 24
Dead embryos 14
Total eggs: 107
Success 64%
About 6:15 am, I was headed to mark nest 32 when I saw a man looking at something in the water. I saw flippers and very close to the shore. I ran over expecting to find the mama sea turtle who just laid her nest. It was a dolphin. He still had some energy and was trying to ride waves into shore, but also turn and swim out. He was injured and being tossed by the waves. He made a dolphin sound. Blood came from his mouth. I called Sharon and ran to Bill and Sharon Higgins house. Called a few other SWTW people. Wayne came down and the tourist, Bill, and Wayne took the dolphin out from the wave break to keep him calmer, trying to keep his blow hole clear.
Gulf World came about one and a half hour after the initial call to Sharon. We were on the beach until 9am. They confirmed the death and took samples, told us it was a spotted adult male.
Was found by Wayne in front of Point of View condos on Seacrest walk. Nice in and out nest. Nothing to get in the way. Loggerhead. Here’s the thing….several of us were nest sitting at nest 1, waiting for hatchlings when just a couple of buildings down from us, a girl came up quietly and took care of her nesting.
No one is in this photo because I had to run over to the dolphin.