Turtle Season Updates
1 nest and 1 false crawl
Nest #3 is located east of 601. 126 eggs were relocated behind the tide line. It had a 40” crawl.
The 42” false crawl was west of 629 and looked so much like a nesting site that we are going to mark it as a Nesting Site and monitor the location.
A false crawl this morning. She traveled a long way and it looked like we just missed her going into the water.
Maybe tomorrow.
Look what we have! Nest number one is located just west of the 600 walkway.
She had a 35 inch crawl and located her nest in a perfectly safe place. Welcome to 2017 Caswell Turtle Season.
One other note interest … we were interviewed by Spectrum News yesterday. It can be viewed on their website.
The 2017 Turtle Season is almost here! Beginning May 1st, the Turtle Watch Morning Patrol will search Caswell Beach for any tracks left by a mother turtle who might be laying eggs. If a nest is discovered, it will be marked and assigned a sequential number, starting with 1.
Hopefully 2017 will continue the trend of increasing number of nests as experienced in the previous 2 years!
Recap of 2016 Season
We are still having inventoried nest’s residue being dug up by either foxes or coyotes. Nothing new to report from us, but I just got a message from Oak Island that one of their nests hatched last night. It had been overwashed and it was at day 50.
We went out early to assess and again with a plan. The beach looked very different this morning but is very populated again now.
Inventoried nests:
37 – 116 shells, 10 unhatched, 4 dead
38 – 107 shells, 10 unhatched/pipped dead, 1 live
40 – 93 shells, 25 pipped dead, 23 unhatched, 5 dead, 26 live
41 – 92 shells, 5 unhatched, 21 pipped dead, 27 live
42 – 78 shells, 7 unhatched/pipped dead, 5 live
44 – 94 shells, 28 unhatched/pipped dead, 3 dead, 34 live
Some inventories were on the scheduled date, some were before the storm urge and nest 37 was today.
Nests missing cages: 45, 46, 51, 52 & 53
Nests at public parking: 48, 49 & 50
Nests at east end by Baptist: 43, 54 & 55
All nest have been over washed and a couple look like they had standing water. Something that I have learned through my adventures in life is that if you have a negative person in the group, negativity spreads. If you have a disgruntled person in the group, nobody is happy anymore. As the leader of this group, I am choosing to be positive. We are not going to give up on any nest yet. The nests that have lost the cages, we still have a general or even good idea of where they are and we know from experience (nest 32) that it can still happen without a cage in place. We are trying to figure out a way to locate each nest as close as we can. We may end up putting green around an area as the day gets closer but every cage has green again today. I have pictures that I will share later. Remember that the overwash could add days to incubation.
Evening all.
I am the first to try to keep a positive outlook but this evening, it doesn’t look so great for our turtles. We stopped at Bob Spake to check on nest 45 and I didn’t actually see the nest. The saving factor is that it’s on a knoll…I think. The picture I’m sending is at the end of the walkway at Bob Spake. The 3 remaining nests at the public parking are all under water. We were not able to make it down to the east end because of the flooded road. We plan to check them all tomorrow on foot whenever the rain stops and will let you know what we find.
We went out this morning and then spot checked again this afternoon. Everything seems to be fairing well.
