Albatrossity2
Posts: 2780
Joined: Mar. 2007
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| Quote (Lou FCD @ Sep. 07 2009,00:27) | Thanks Alby. I don't know about Jesse owning a house there, though it wouldn't surprise me. I would, if I could afford it.
Night three of sitting the nest, and still no turtles. Two other nests laid the same day hatched last week a few miles up the beach. One hatched this evening about a mile up from where we are, but I didn't get to see it.
There seems to be a depression in the nest area, but that's just as likely to be wishful thinking as it is hatching turtles. The night wasn't as good for photos as the last two nights, but I haven't downloaded the shots to the laptop yet. I'll do that tomorrow and add any decent ones to the set. |
I'm not sure I want a beach house there, given the transient nature of barrier islands, but I'd definitely like to have the money needed to even enter into that discussion! We've spent many weeks on Carolina beaches near Wilmington, and it is a lovely part of the world. Here's a story that will definitely date me!
The very first year that we spent a week on Ocean Isle with my brother, sister-in-law and their sons, we were out on the beach after dark and discovered a line of baby turtles wandering vaguely oceanward. This was before the days of the Turtle Patrol and the crime-scene tape and the nest monitoring and all of the other trappings that make a turtle nest hatching seem like a tightly-controlled event. We found the nest by following the line of turtles toward the high-tide line, it was, as with most nests in those days, completely unmarked by tape and stay-off warnings.
Some of the baby turtles were heading toward the lights of the houses, others were being attacked by large fiddler crabs, and a few were being threatened by kids with fireworks. So we shooed off the kids and the fiddler crabs, and dug a shallow trench from the nest toward the water. We probably didn't follow all the protocols that the Turtle Patrol folks would dictate; we even picked up a couple of those headed in the wrong direction and sent them toward the ocean, and I'm pretty sure that actual turtle contact is verboten these days! I took pictures with a flash on the camera, and I know that is verboten too. But we did our best, and probably saved a few turtles from an early death on the beach. We stayed until the turtles stopped coming out of the ground, and that was far past my regular bedtime!
That was the only time I've seen baby turtles. On subsequent trips we've sat with the Turtle Patrol folks, like you, and waited for nests to hatch, but no luck. One year I found the tracks where a female had lumbered up onto the beach to lay her eggs, but by the time I got back to the house to tell the others the Patrol had already cordoned off the area and were busy shooing folks away. The Ocean Isle Turtle Patrol can be a tad officious... I don't really blame them for their concern, but some of them could use a bit of help with their "people skills".
Enjoy your watching, and take lots of pics (without flash, of course). And you might enjoy some pictures that my friend Judd Patterson (a world-class photographer!) took of a Green sea turtle laying her eggs on a Florida beach recently.
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Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind
Has been obligated from the beginning
To create an ordered universe
As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.
- Pattiann Rogers
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