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| A Yellow Corn Snake right at our walkway... delightful. |
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| Finding tons of hermit crabs all along the beach. |
Ok, now we get to the action! Well, soon... We kept checking our nest during the day and sitting with it at night. I was so excited and happy because the hatch date was creeping closer and closer. My family figured out that sitting out on the beach at night wasn't as boring as we thought! There are no city lights to block the view, so there are thousands of stars across the black night sky.
We spotted:
- The milky way
- A perfect view of the constellation Scorpius
- The big dipper
- A satellite move across the horizon three nights in a row
- Dozens of shooting stars
So there were other things to do than have a staring contest with our nest, but we still kept eyeing it every 30 seconds. There also was a nest one beach access from ours with a family with two kids monitoring it who were so much fun. We met up with them almost every night to play flashlight tag or hide and seek. (There was not much to hide around. You could hide behind sandpile #1 or sandpile #2.)
As the days went by, I started to get nervous and kept hoping and wishing on those shooting stars that we would see our nest boil. Day 56. Day 57. Day 58. Yes, we all thought Day 58 was going to be like all the others... We were really, mega, wrong.
I was making a mini sand castle and decided to glance at our nest for the twenty-sixth time that evening. I got up from the blanket, wobbled over to the cage then stopped. Mouth open, I gasped and called my my mom saying,
"Mom, I... the nest... I need the... Gimme a flashlight!"
I couldn't even spit out the word "depression." Because in the middle of our nest there was a big, sunken, hole. We fumbled and switched on a flashlight and had to turn it right back off.
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| The depression after boil. |
There were hatchlings already coming up to the runway!
The nest was swamped. There were so many coming out at the same time that all you saw was a black blob in the cage. As they crawled along through the holes of the cage, some were even caught riding the others shells (lazy cheaters!). Soon enough, there were tons of adorable black Loggerheads scampering down the sandy runway.
We all then took our places. Me, the turtle counter and helper of any stragglers that got turned around. My mom, the white light holder in the water. And my brother, the major turtle helper of any that needed help. He also searched for any that went the wrong way or got stuck in the seaweed.
So as they crawled past the runway, they just kept going. All of them straight to the white light and ocean. They looked so happy, and it appeared all of them made it to the water safely. There was one turtle that got stuck in the depression pit. My brother shined his red light right beside the depression and it gave the turtle new hope. He pushed himself out and followed the red light to the white one I was now holding.
I backed up a little closer to the water, then my mom came up. And at that moment, I forgot to keep backing up. But never fear! That unstoppable hatchling just crawled right over my toe and into the water! We gathered together then walked up and down the beach checking for any stray turtles. Thankfully, there were none so we went back up to our blanket and jumped up and down and whooped and celebrated. Because our nest was an amazing full boil nest that we actually got to see.
Three days later our nest excavation came, and I actually got to dig out the nest! We pulled out 126 hatched eggs from the night of the boil. And we found four baby stragglers that were still hanging out in the nest, so we got to release them into the water.
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| One of our turtles at the excavation. |
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| Bye-bye turtles! |
So really this blog is done! The nest actually hatched many days ago but we have been kind of busy getting fully unpacked and settled in at home. But I do think I will write in this blog again someday.
Hopefully with a blue intern shirt!
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