PHeather's PHamily: Turtles!

I joined a second homeschool group a few weeks back to hopefully meet some more people and do some field trips and the first e-mail I got after joining was a message about a sea turtle nest excavation! The group had adopted a nest on the beach and the eggs had hatched a few days prior, so we got to go out to the nest and see the volunteers dig down to the nest and sort through the eggs. AND they said there may be a few babies still trying to make their way out of the nest. We were so excited!

The nest was underground below that cage...

It was really hot and muggy that day, without even a breeze on the beach, which was really weird! And the biting deer/horse flies were just attacking all of us with a vengeance, but it was worth it! As soon as the volunteer starting moving sand away with her hands, she found a live baby right near the top! She pulled him out and placed him into a cooler with some sand (no ice... haha) until later.

Then the volunteers took the cage off the nest so they could dig down further...

When they reached the eggs they measured the depth of the nest... 21 inches! The volunteers said that the sand spray from the momma's flippers while she was digging her nest was 19 feet wide! At the bottom the volunteer found another live baby and carefully pulled him out. I was so excited because I didn't think there would be any left!

They flattened out an area of sand to lay out the eggs and sorted them into three sections: hatched, unhatched/rotten, and partially-hatched eggs. You can see in that one section closest to the lady that poor little guy who almost made it out, but not quite. :(

There were 109 eggs in the nest, but only 33 of them hatched. Hopefully one of those 33 makes it to adulthood to come back here to lay her eggs!

Then we had to do some swimming... the boys couldn't resist.

Jackson never left the nest until the very end, though. He was enthralled. And lucky that we stayed close because at the end the volunteers walked around with the babies so that we could all take pics and see them close up!

The volunteers wait until nighttime and release the babies right by the nest and let them make their way to the gulf on their own. They said this is important so they can "imprint" on the sand and hopefully come back to this exact spot to lay their eggs in the future. So amazing.

And then we played in the gulf for a little while. The water was the perfect temperature but there was a red flag and a pretty strong current so the boys had to stay close to shore.

This was Davis's first real experience at the beach! It got me a little teary-eyed to see him sitting there... I guess since this time last year we had just moved here and he was just a tiny little bean in my belly. And now here he is in the flesh! Lots of chubby baby flesh. :)