October 24, 2007:  Turtle release on St. George!  This turtle was picked up by a local fishing guide and brought in because he thought the turtle might be sick or injured.  It was rehabbed at the Gulf World facility in Panama City, Florida, given antibiotics and fed a good diet to be sure she was OK.  She was returned to St. George Island to be released back into her home waters.  It was quite a sight!

Here she is in the van that transported her from Gulf World, then being transported to the beach in a sling carried by volunteers.  The Gulf World guy then freed her flippers, and she was on her way.

Once she got started towards the water, it was a quick trip, with Islanders cheering her on!

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September 15, 2007:  The 2007 season yielded 6 leatherback nests, most likely all from the same mother turtle, and none of the eggs hatched.  The average clutch size was 95 eggs.  The eggs did not appear to be fertile, so most likely the mother turtle did not find a suitable mate.  The leatherback eggs are a good bit larger than those of loggerheads, the size of a large ping pong ball rather than a golf ball, and the clutch also contains a number of "spacers" which do not contain a yolk at all. 

We also had 66 loggerhead nests this year, with 49 hatching successfully, while 7 were washed away by high tides before hatching.  We had approximately 3500 hatchlings find their way to water, with around 400 disorienting to lights on the beach.  This is a preventable problem - homeowners and guests need to be educated to the need to keep lights in their houses off or shaded from the beach during nesting season, May through October.

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May 15, 2007:  Here we go - and our first turtle crawl on St. George for this year is a .... leatherback sea turtle!

She was found by a turtle patrol volunteer at 6:15AM, in the process of laying her eggs, and these excellent pictures were taken as she was finishing up, making her orientation circle, and moving on back out to the water.

On St. George, the predominant species we see is the loggerhead turtle, but occasionally we do get a green turtle, a leatherback, or even a rare Kemp's Ridley. 

This turtle was a small leatherback, measuring 43" by 61" using a cloth tape measure. The track measured 87" wide.  The reason the track is

so wide is that the front flippers extend well beyond the body, and as she pulls herself forward, pushing sand back, she leaves the very distinctive ridges of the leatherback track well outside the groove where her body moved along the sand.  

I went down to the beach when I got the email, and was able to see the tracks still undisturbed by the wind.  I had seen lots of pictures, but never one in person.  It was an impressive display!

We had a loggerhead who nested on St. George several years ago, but none of the nests hatched.  The turtle that came up today could nest another 6 or 7 times, typically 10 days between nestings, and she could lay another nest almost anywhere along the twelve miles of beach we patrol.  So I'll be on the look out!

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Notes from the 2006 Season:

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May 12, 2006:  First turtle crawl on St. George Island for the year!  Approximately 2 weeks earlier than last year, the first turtle nest was discovered by yours truly during my dawn patrol early this morning.  She didn't crawl far up the beach before she started her nest, so this nest could be subject to high storm tides.  If it doesn't get washed away, it is due to hatch sometime during the first 2 weeks of July!

June 2006:  Tropical Storm Alberto blew through with a lot of high surf, taking 6 of our existing nests away with it completely.  The rest were OK, although several were overwashed to the extent that extra sand was left piled on the nest sites.  These nest may not hatch. We won't know for sure until we do the nest evaluation, well after the incubation period is up.  Turtles started crawling again the day after Alberto, with new nests the following week.

July 8, 2006:  The July 4th weekend brought a lot of fireworks on the beach, and the turtles stayed away.  However, we're up to 40 nests that we are monitoring, and hopefully the crawls will resume this week. 

November 1, 2006:  Our final data is in for the nesting season, and here is the summary:

73 Loggerhead (caretta caretta) nests laid from 5/26 through 8/7

72 Non-nesting emergences (false crawls)

15 nests washed awy or negatively impacted by TS Albert on 6/12

66 nests evaluated for hatchling success

63 nests hatched

15 nests had babies disoriented to lights

7129 eggs counted during nest evaluations

5275 hatchlings emerged from nests

958 hatchlings were disoriented by lights

A good season, although with more disorientations than we like to see.  There is still work to do educating homeowners about their lights, which can impact the baby turtles not only from the beachfront houses, but also well inland.  Street lights on some corners, across the street from the beach, are also proving to be a problem that must continue to be addressed.

Turtle Patrol on St. George Island

I’ve been volunteering with the St. George Island Volunteer Turtlers group for the last three years, walking an assigned stretch of beach at dawn each morning. We look for turtle crawls left the night before that indicate a new nest (as in the picture below taken by Andree Grogan) and for baby turtle tracks later in the season as they begin to hatch and emerge from their nests.

The mother turtle crawls are very distinctive – 30-40 inches across, with alternating flipper marks on either side and the smooth wide track of their shell in between. The baby tracks are similar, but much smaller in scale.

Andree Grogan took this photograph in May 2005, during dawn patrol.

Once we find the nests, we mark, measure, and record the stats for the crawl, to be added to a larger database managed by the Apalachicola National Estuarine Research Reserve folks, and to the larger organizations in Florida.

The babies emerge approximately 55-60 days after the mother lays the nest, usually at night, and make a dash for the ocean. There can be 50-100 babies or more in a nest.

The baby turtle tracks are a very distinctive marker that the babies have emerged from the nest, that is, if the wind hasn't blown too hard, and it hasn't rained, and the sand is not bone dry.  The tracks are only about an eigth of an inch or so deep, miniatures of the mother's tracks, and there are hundreds of them.  They are quickly erased by wind once the sun comes up and they dry out.

The nest chamber caves in once the babies leave the nest, and the depression in the sand that is left behind is another visual cue that the babies have emerged. 

What you hope to see is most if not all of the tracks leading south from the depression where the nest was, directly to the water.  Sometimes, as with this nest, you will see some tracks wandering north from the nest cavity, towards the dunes.  Typically, those tracks will eventually turn around and head towards the water, as the babies pick up the cues they need to get them moving towards the water, away from the dunes.

Baby turtles are especially vulnerable to artificial lights when they hatch out, and can become disoriented.  Lights that can confuse a baby's lock on the horizon include flashlights, porch lights, living room lights, garage lights, street lights a block away, fireworks, you name it.  Anything bright or that causes a glow can serve to interrupt a baby turtle's natural inclination to move towards the water. 

Disoriented babies become prey to crabs, birds, racoons, or other night feeders, and spend energy crawling in directions away from where they need to be.  We have found babies stranded under porch lights, under street lights, and up in the dunes struggling to get to what they think is the horizon. 

Three days after hatching, the trained volunteers excavate the hatched nest and count the hatched eggs and make a note of any eggs that did not hatch or any babies left behind in the nest.  All this is recorded and sent to the Apalachicola National Estuarine Research Center scientists, who compile the database of information on turtle nests and hatchings throughout the region. 

Every once in a great while, we find a nest that has hatched, but in which the babies do not emerge as expected.  In the picture at left, the babies can be seen boiling out of the nest, very unexepectedly,  during a routine dawn evaluation.   These babies beat a fast path to the gulf, making their way across a wide stretch of beach and into the surf in less than 15 minutes.

It's very rare to see an emergence, since they typically happen at night, and the 15 minutes it takes them to make it to the surf is over before you know it. 

Here is another shot of them from the north side of the nest, headed straight up and out towards the surf. 

You can see how they use each other, the sides of the neck of the nest cavity, and the sand those in front of them push back into the nest cavity as they scramble their way up and out.