Nest #6 Crawl
“Barbara has nest! Not a false crawl but an actual nest,” Charlotte could hardly contain herself when the call came in from the hotline. Two weeks in a row Barbara has had a nest!
Barbara finds her second nest of the season.
The Nesting Response Team was called out and in minutes, the beach was full. This nest will be well cared for.
Mom did a great job coming up the beach but she settled near the high tide line and in a swale so it was determined that the site should be moved to higher ground.
NESTers are careful not to rotate the eggs.
So Jackie ran to get her cooler as the rest of the crew took measurements and began to dig for eggs. Seeing as Jonny had ‘let’ Barbara take that part of their run this morning, we let him be the first to dig. The deeper he went the harder the sand seemed until suddenly, “Oh wait, it’s really soft over here.” On the first dig he got the eggs! It wasn’t perfectly centered, we had to expand the hole about an inch or two to get on top of the egg chamber. KC must have been off her game a little but Jonny forgave her.
Louise carefully hands Peggy an egg from the nest.
The team started filling the cooler with sand from the nest site and then together, they made an egg line. Since embryos form an attachment to the shell shortly after being laid, NESTers worked very carefully to remove the eggs without any rotating. Louise took the egg from the nest, handed it off to Peggy, and then Jonny took it and carefully placed it in the cooler. Jill stood above counting each egg as it was placed in the cooler. 97.. 98… 99… 100… 101! Final count was 101 eggs.
The relocation assembly line.
As all the eggs came out, the team began to excavate a new site on higher ground for the nest. Using the same dimensions of the original nest site, the site was finished off with the addition of sand from the original site. Then one-by-one in the same order they came out, they were placed in their new resting spot.