Turtle Trip, Day 2 (Sunday): Beach Cleanup & The Boneyard

We woke up at 5:00am so we could head to the beach for patrol at 5:30. We checked nests from a list to see if they had hatched or not yet, marking down which ones would need to be dug up later. Kris, the woman heading up the Project, drove the atv and me, Bobby, and another volunteer, Christine, took turns doing the other three jobs. The note taker’s job was to call out coordinates and nest numbers and record findings. The spotter’s job was to look for marked nests (not an easy task because it was still dark out for most of the trip) and tell the driver when to pull over. The runner’s job was to jump out and physically check the nest for signs of hatching or predation and report back. 

Turtle tracks from a recently hatched nest, partially washed away by the tide.

To make it easier to find the nests next time, Kris drove the mule in a circle while the runner was out checking nests. This way, the next time we come out, we just look for circles in the sand. We checked around 50 nests this morning. One weird thing we found was a dolphin skull.

Dolphin remains.

A lot of us napped after morning patrols, and then at around 10:30am we left to meet up with a coastal cleanup crew who happen to do a beach cleanup of our turtle beach once a year. Between all of us, a lot of trash was picked up, including a bunch of big and/or weird trash, like in tact plastic deck chairs with mussels and barnacles growing on them, a TV, and crab traps. A lot of what we picked up was plastic, though. Bottle caps, wrappers, balloons, you name it. Quite a few glass jars and completely unopened bottled waters, too.  The odd thing about this trash cleanup is how clean the beach looks at a first glance, but then you go looking for trash, and you find a lot of it.  It makes me wonder how much trash is on the beach near my house that you just don't notice, because it's not a super nice beach and you can see trash all over it just at a glance.  I pick some of it up almost every time I go there with my dog, but usually just one or two big, obvious things.  Someone really ought to organize a full-scale cleanup back home.

We also found quite a few more animal bones: dolphin (a different one from yesterday, fox, deer, and bird. We found a lot of alligator tracks too. 

Bird bones with feathers still attached.

One rather sad thing we found was a dead turtle under the protective mesh from a nest we checked this morning. It looked like maybe a bird had gotten to it through the mesh but couldn’t get it out to eat it. 

Poor dead baby turtle under the mesh.  Probably the victim of a bird pecking through the mesh or a ghost crab digging under it.  The mesh protects against large predators, but nothing can really be done to keep the ghost crabs out.

Ghost crab coming out of his hole.

Ghost crab looking the other way while we try to get a picture of it with Platymoose.

When it did finally turn around, it freaked the fuck out to see this big, strange animal staring at it silently.  It was pretty funny to watch it try to threaten a stuffed animal and then run away.

Kris, the coordinator, said we will check that one again tonight. (Update: the other crew was assigned that nest and turns out the one we saw was a straggler and the rest of the nest had already hatched. There were no more babies to rescue from that clutch.)

Gator tracks on the beach.

There were a lot of cool plants on the beach that I'd never seen before which I'm sure don't grow where I'm from.  Some of them were spiky and to be avoided.

Everyone had pb&j for lunch and then some of us went back to the beach for a quick walk.  It's pretty and nice to walk along, and has quite a few nice shells you don't find back home.  Bobby went in the water, but I will wait until we have more time another day.  I dipped my toes in, and the water was really nice and warm.  There are a lot of different shore birds on this beach.  I didn't get pictures of all of them, but it was cool to see them undisturbed, acting like birds on the beach instead of going after people's snacks.

I napped again back at the cabin until supper time, which was homemade oven pizza and it was really good. All the volunteers here seem really nice. All of them this week seem to be middle-aged to retired ladies who all know each other and have been doing this for years. Some are semi-local (from Georgia), most from other southern states like Alabama, Arkansas, or the Carolinas.  It's a bit surprising how liberal-minded and environmentally-conscious people can actually be found in the Deep South.

On our way to and from the beach, we pass a little swamp, which sometimes has an alligator in it.  My photos from today are blurry, but I wasn't getting any closer to snap a picture, because this guy was BIG.

You can kind of see the gator through the trees here.

That thing that looks like a floating log with an eyeball right in the middle there is a huge alligator.

On our beach patrol this evening Darnice and Bobby chased away a fox and we saved four turtles. Two others we couldn’t save because ghost crabs had already gotten to them. Again, worth getting our feet wet. We basically combined this morning’s nest checks with last night’s post-hatch inventory digs. 

The big mesh on bottom has holes big enough to let baby turtle through, but too small to let raccoons and foxes through.  It keeps them from digging up the nest.  The small mesh on top keeps birds from getting the babies from above during a boil, while they're vulnerable and not fully out of the nest yet.  It's hard to see it, but there is a turtle-sized "door" on the side facing the ocean.  On our nest checks, we sometimes have to dig away sand that has blown over it so that turtles can find the exit once they hatch.  Platymoose is standing guard.

Yesterday we went south on the beach. Today we went north. The north side of the beach has a lot more hurricane damage and there is this section with massive dead trees in all states of falling over, which is called The Boneyard. The name is definitely fitting. It looks spooky and crazy and is a little bit dangerous to drive through, especially at night. There are all of these new tidal pools/salt ponds forming around the branches of fallen trees, trunk spikes sticking straight out of the ground, and lots of debris to get in your way.  It was dark, so I didn't get any good pictures of the boneyard on patrol, but I know there are some good ones from later in the week, which I'll share when I get to them in a future post.

The Boneyard in the dark.

A few of the nests we had to check were in the boneyard, and there was one that had just hatched. The main exodus had already happened, but we rescued the stragglers, some of which were caught or tangled up in plant debris. This is the nest the fox was trying to get into. Again, I think we helped them more than we strictly are supposed to, but I did not come all this way and put up with all these mosquitoes to just hope that a hatchling I saw made it. Especially after counting over a hundred dead eggs in a previous nest we checked, I was not going to stand idly by.

One of the turtles we saved, stuck in plant debris, right next to my foot.  You have to be careful when walking around on the beach at night so you don't step on any babies.  You have to shuffle your feet slowly if you know there may be babies nearby so that you just brush them out of the way instead of crushing them by accident.

Newly freed turtle scurrying to the ocean. 

Run, baby, run!  You have to use only red lights when looking at and photographing turtles at night, because white lights will disorient them and lead them away from the ocean.

Speaking of mosquitoes, they are awful here. Worse than the Appalachian trail I think, which is saying something. They swarm you, bug spray or no. You begin to question if it’s even working, but then you wash it off your hands so you can touch the turtles if there are some to rescue later, and within seconds of exposing your bare hands, you have dozens of mosquitoes trying to bite just your hands, then you realize how good your bug spray actually is. Thank God for DEET.

Anyway, it’s time to try and sleep because we are up at dawn again tomorrow for more patrols. I say try because I have bug bites that are already super annoying. We shall see.