Sea Turtles

 

When we arrived at the beach we were very excited to find out that there was an actual loggerhead turtle nest right in front of our hotel. This is a picture of it. We also found out that the eggs would hatch sometime during our stay. How lucky is that. Summers parents are both marine biologists and neither one of them have ever seen a next hatch. We watched every night and waited. We knew that the turtles would come out and go to the water and swim away. Well, that is what is supposed to happen. Around 10 one night we heard someone say, 'the turtles are coming!' We all ran to the beach and sure enough there was a hole at the top of the nest. We didn't know if it would be 10 minutes or several hours before they came out. They (team sent from the aquarium to protect the eggs)told us that we could not take pictures or use regular flashlights. Also we were not to touch the turtles when they came out. Well, about an hour later the sand looked like it started to boil and all of the little turtles were trying to come out at the same time. The problem began then. The moon was not very large that night and even though they shown the flash lights in the direction of the water, the baby turtles saw the lights on the hotel and started going the wrong direction. There were at least 20 people standing around and no one wanted to touch them because they had told us not to. It became evident in a matter of a minute that we were going to have to round up the turtles or they would be lost or eaten by the ghost crabs. I tried to pick them up and put them back in the right direction but they just kept coming at me. There were at least 20 of them coming over the top. I finally held out my T-shirt and put in very carefully as many as I could carry and took them down to the edge of the water. It was so cool to put them in a wave and watch them swim away. We continued to find babies on our walk back to the hotel. Summers stayed out for a couple of hours trying to catch ghost crabs and rescued a few more. Later in the week the group came back and dug up the nest to do the research that was required and then very carefully covered everything up. The nests are protected by the law in NC, you can not mess with them. I tried to explain to Zander and Esy how amazing what we had just seen was, but they didn't understand. I hope that they remember it later and realize how lucky we all were.