Sunday kept our Nesting Response team hopping. In the morning we were called to a potential crawl with a ‘nest site’ that turned out to be maybe two chairs pulled up the beach and placed perfectly at a pit and pile of sand. With the heavy rain we had the 
night before, it made it that much more difficult for our ATV driver to determine exactly what she had. Then Sunday evening around 8PM, there was a report of a turtle hanging out at the shoreline in Nags Head but no turtle was sighted crawling out. Finally, around 10:30 PM we got a call from some people up in the 4WD section of Corolla who were hanging out with a nesting loggerhead. Finally, the real deal!
So our 4WD NESTers Karen and Betty headed out and marked off the site until the morning when more responders could come.
NESTers staked off the nest site during to protect the area until morning.
The crawl showed that it appears this turtle has a barnacle on her plastron.
When the Nesting Response Team arrived in the morning, they confirmed what the observers said the night before… this was a big momma! Her crawl width was 103 cm and it appeared that she had a barnacle on the bottom of the plastron that left a line down the center of her drag. Nest #4 had a similar crawl (100 cm width with a barnacle drag) but the timing is a little off for it to be the same turtle. The crawls were just shy of being two weeks apart but DNA will tell us and maybe these nests were laid by the same turtle.
Jess and Betty dig to confirm eggs.
Nesting responders double stake the site for the 4WD beach.