Turtle Dads

To occupy our time while walking the Atlantic beach near us, my friend (Phil) and I started keeping track of the various sea turtle nests that appear on our beach during the turtle nesting season (usually from about April - September on our beach). We neither disturb the nesting female turtles, since most of them are finished laying their eggs by daylight, nor do we obstruct any new hatchlings from reaching the ocean once the nest hatches. However, we do have lots of interesting times plotting the location of the nests with our handheld GPS and keeping an Excel listing of the lattitude, longitude, date nest was laid, date the nest hatched (or was destroyed by storms), the number of days that the eggs had incubated and the type of turtle (Leatherback, Kemp's Ridley, Green, Loggerhead) that laid the eggs. We cheat and use the official designations that are written on the stakes surrounding the nests by the environmental group that is hired each year to officially track and mark the nests for that last bit of data. In any case, we enjoyed tracking 83 nests on our section of beach last year and determined that the average incubation period was 55 days. The generally accepted average for egg incubation is 45 - 60 days. This blog will share our sea turtle nest tracking efforts this year.