Turtle Season!

It is turtle season in Florida!

In Florida, sea turtles come ashore to nest beginning in May and hatching continues until late October. A female can lay several nests during one season and only nests every two or three years. The hard process of nesting takes hours. A turtle must drag her massive weight out of the water to the dunes. She uses her back flippers to dig a hole and deposits about one hundred rubbery eggs, each the size of a ping-pong ball. The turtle disguises the nest by flinging sand over it. Once she leaves the nest, she never returns.

After incubating for two months, the hatchelings break out of their shells and thrash about together causing the walls of the nest to collapse and the bottom of the hole to rise. Once near the surface, the hatchelings wait until the sand temperature cools to emerge. Therefore most emerge after dark. Once out of the nest, the turtles scramble to the water and swim offshore where they will live for several years in seaweed beds drifting along the Gulf Stream. As the turtles grow older they move into coastal waters.

http://www.seefloridaonline.com/turtles/

Isn't that just AMAZING!! We headed out to the beach last night for a walk and were amazed by how many "trails" we saw to nests... We are going to try and get out there this friday night (Between 10pm-2am) to hopefully catch a sea turtle in action! How cool would that be!!! 

Here Brent is pointing to a trail to a nest. You can see the belly trail with the little fin wholes all the way up the side! 

Better look at it... 

Here is a nest. It basically just looks like a whole that kids have dug, but you can know it's a turtle nest when it's accompanied by the trail... 

This one is pretty cool because you can see on the left side where the turtle trail comes up. Towards the bottom of the picture you see the round "hole/nest" and to the right of Brent where the turtle went back into the ocean, never to see her young again! 

Here is another picture of a nest. Also, it's interesting to see the four wheel tracks. These turtles/nests are HIGHLY monitored and I'm pretty sure protected. It's illegal to mess around with them. 

Beached Whale??? ;-) Just kidding, but after our 1-2 mile walk on the beach baby was feeling PRETTY HEAVY in there. 

This was the biggest turtle trail we came across. Must have been a big momma! Look how WIDE her belly marks are in the sand! 

 ... compared to this more common size trail below... 

Now this find was CRAZY! It's really hard to see in this picture, but the turtle trail came up the sand the this ridge and continued UP the ridge (and you can see on the right side of Brent there was some "struggle with roots" to get up to the top, the eggs were laid at the top of the ridge and we could see the turtle trail come DOWN the ridge on Brent's left side... soo amazing. 

Ok-- so for some fun... One I have my sweater on my head because it was pretty windy and I have super sensitive ears to wind/cold. So I wrapped this around my head. But mostly this picture makes me think:

Be with the one who makes you smile. I think we do that for each other! :) 

Towards the very end of our walk it was now dark out... still no early bird turtles coming in to lay eggs (Bummer!) but we did find this washed up jelly fish on the shore, so that was neat. Unfortunate that it was dead and tangled in sea weed, but cool to see it.

Hopefully we can get out to the beach late Friday night and see some turtle action to share with everyone!!