Around midnight last night a local volunteer was awakened to a neighbor pounding on her window. He was told her there was a turtle laying eggs on the beach right now. She immediately rolled out of bed and grabbed some stakes.
Crawls in the 4WD beach can be particularly tough to find in the morning if there is a lot of traffic on the beach before our patrols arrive. Thankfully, our volunteers were there in the night to protect the site. By morning, little evidence of the crawl remained.
Nest #20 – The nest site was difficult to identify with all the foot traffic.
Nest #20 – Green path represents the suspected exiting crawl, the green circle the body pit and the yellow circle the potential nest site.
The team prevailed however, and found the eggs on their first attempt in less than a minute (pure dumb luck!). The nest was was very peculiar as turtles normally crawl up the beach, lay eggs, and immediately leave from what we call a body pit, heading back to the ocean. In this case, the turtle crawled in, seemed to turn a little north, laid eggs, and then crawled west toward the dunes before looping back and leaving the beach.
To adopt this nest, visit http://seaturtle.org/nestdb/adopt/?b=1 and select ID# 154001 or click here.
The egg chamber exposed on the first dig!