IT'S A START!

The chart looks rather "blah" this year because of the happenings discussed in the previous blog in this series. The "color-coded" chart shows: "possible remaining nests" in yellow/orange; "hatched nests" in green; "wave/storm destroyed" nests in blue and "documented remaining nests" in black. The additional color-coding was necessary this year, since it wasn't discovered until early July that EAI. Inc., the company employed to record sea turtle nests along our section of the beach, was only "staking-out" one out of each 24 nests that are laid by the turtles. That knowledge necessitated a change in the approach to our own record-keeping. Instead of relying only on EAI, Inc.'s stake-outs of nests, our "team" will attempt to go back to the beach and determine all possible nests that have been laid since March. Obviously, that is an extremely difficult task, since many/most of the traces of "sea-turtle nesting" (i.e., sea turtle tracks from the ocean to the nest and back to the ocean) have been erased/covered by beach-walker traffic, weather, and/or EAI, Inc.'s purposeful running over any tracks with their 4-wheelers to protect the location of the nests.



However, as you can see, we have given it the old "retirees' try" and have "marked" each suspected/possible sea turtle nest, on our section of the beach, on the chart that you see in this blog. To make our record more complete in the future, we will have to work in reverse once we find nests that have hatched and "project backward" our best guesstimate of the date that each next was laid. We'll use last years' "average # of days incubation" (55 days - including both Leatherback and Loggerhead nests) as a way to project when the nests may have been laid. It's not as good a procedure as we used last year but, under the circumstances, it's probably the best we can do this year.



You may be able to increase the size of the chart, for easier reading, if you double-click on the chart.