Sea Turtle Watch

Cold Stranding 2010

sharon — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:04:25 +0000

January 2010 was extremely cold in N.W. Florida. St. Joe’s Bay, near Port St. Joe, is a shallow Bay and with 14 nights well below freezing the bay’s water became very cold. The bay is a winter home to many sea turtles because of it’s many grasses. Green are the most dominate sea turtle in the bay. Sea turtles, being reptiles, need warm water so with the very cold water we had over 1800 sea turtles strand. These sea turtles, cold stunned ,were picked up and taken to Sea World in Panama City Beach, warmed up, checked out, and then released when there were warm. South Walton Turtle Watch was proud to take part in this great adventure. We are sorry to say over 600 of these sea turtles died but the rest lived and hopefully will come back to nest on our beaches. We hope to see these sea turtles back on our beaches as nesting adults.

Great Story

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:27:01 +0000

2009: False Crawl 20

admin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:32:29 +0000

Was found Sunday morning 8/09/09 by Cathy Felty, near nest 5 at Paradise by the Sea. Those girls keep on coming!

2009: Nest 37

admin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:32:01 +0000

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)

2009: Nest 36

admin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:29:14 +0000

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

2009: Nest 35

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:24:51 +0000

Nest #35 was found on Sunday 8/02/09 by John Andrews a loggerhead in Inlet Beach…Way to go John!

2009: Nest 34

admin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:05:23 +0000

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 %

2009: False Crawl 19

admin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:03:45 +0000

False Crawl #19 was found 8/02/09 a loggerhead in the Stallworth Area by Anthony and Sherry

2009: Nest 33

admin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:01:53 +0000

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%

Dolphin Stranding

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:30:44 +0000

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.