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| Ranger Dan carries the bucket of two baby turtles to the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. |
After completing our bathroom cleaning duties on Monday morning, Jo and I drove our electric car over to enjoy a few minutes of the beach. We parked beside a Ranger truck and walked north, up the sandy beach, watching the terns doing their helicopter business of hovering over the water, heads pointed straight down, and then plummeting into the salt water to grab an unsuspecting fish. We noticed, in the distance, a coven of people, kneeling in the sand, bowed down as though in prayer.
This is where we found Ranger Dan and Ranger Kyle, a new ranger to us, digging into the sand at the last of the turtle nests on Honeymoon Island. They were surrounded by three old folks who were out for a walk on the beach. Dan had already uncovered 36 loggerhead turtle eggs that had already released their baby turtles.
Another 42 turtle eggs, round and white, were either perfect, still waiting to hatch, or they had drowned embryos inside after being in the sand through Hurricane Isaac.
The rangers also had uncovered two newborn turtles which had broken through their shells that very morning. The rangers had carefully lifted them out of the egg pit and placed them in a bucket that had a layer of sand. These two little guys would be kept until late evening and Dan would release them into their brave new world.
The rangers photographed the new hatchlings and recorded the count of eggs. Then Dan carefully replaced the round eggs in the nest on the chance they still held viable turtles that were just not ready to make their break for freedom. He also replaced the egg shells of the hatched turtles. He covered them back with the soft sand.
He told us he’d visited the nest last Friday and had noticed a crater effect which told him some of the babies had hatched and had burrowed out and made their journey to the Gulf of Mexico. He’d determined to give the remaining eggs another few days to hatch.
The rangers knocked on the door of our motor home at 9 in the evening. It was time to release the two turtle babies. We drove over in the complete darkness of a moonless night and joined a group of diehard turtle enthusiasts for the release. The little turtles didn’t seem to have much sprawl to them in the bottom of the bucket. I know it would have been foolhardy to release them in the morning sunshine. The hundreds of seagulls, terns, pelicans, man-o-war birds, as well as crabs and assorted sea life would have seen them as breakfast – or at least an appetizer had they been launched into the surf in the sun. But I wondered about the little creatures waiting 12 hours before being released. They had no food or water, just a quiet, warm pail.
Dan lifted them out and placed them on the beach. The high tide had just turned. It was hard to see the little guys as they stood on the beach, listening to the sound of the surf. They didn’t make a run for it. But a wave rolled in and grabbed them, pulling them out into the Gulf, but then pushed them back up on the shore. They moved a little. But there was not much energy. Jo had a flashlight that she’d fashioned with a red cover so we could keep an eye on them without confusing them with bright lights.
The next wave sucked one of them out into surf and he was on his way for better or worse. Dan reached down and picked up the other turtle and launched it as well.
If all goes well – and this is a big “if” – these two turtles will make it through the surf and will find some food. If they are not eaten by crabs or other predatory fish, they will not return to these shores for about 30 years. They will go off on an incredible journey, wandering out of the Gulf of Mexico, feeding in the Sargasso Sea, getting caught up in the Gulf Stream, that great river of water that runs up the east coast of the U.S. This current loops across the Atlantic Ocean to the northwest coast of Scotland. They will swim onward, south to Spain, then along the west coast of Africa. They’ll cross the South Atlantic and catch a current that’ll bring them up past Uruguay, Brazil, and into the Caribbean Sea.
It is part of their coding that they will, in the fullness of time, mate out there in the ocean and the females will slowly locate their native beach, here on Honeymoon Island. On a full and rising tide in June or July in 2042, she will laboriously pull herself out of the water and flipper her way up the beach. Her coding knows she must get well above the high-water mark before she begins to dig her hole in the sand.
She will lay close to 100 eggs and then cover them with the sand before waddling back to the sea before the dawn breaks. Fifty-three to 55 days later, if the raccoons and seabirds don’t uncover the nest and gobble the eggs, the first flight of turtles will break through their shells, eat the remains of their yolk sac to provide them the strength to climb through the sand and head for the open sea so the cycle can begin again.
The U.S. Federal government has listed the loggerhead as endangered worldwide. In the U.S., the loggerhead's nesting areas are divided among four states:
Florida (91%)
South Carolina (6.5%)
Georgia (1.5%)
North Carolina (1%)
Florida beaches account for one third of the world's total population of loggerheads.
The loggerhead is the most common sea turtle in Florida.
It is named for its large head
Powerful jaws crush mollusks, crabs and encrusting animals attached to reefs and rocks
An estimated 14,000 females nest in the southeastern U.S, each year
Adults weigh 200 to 350 pounds and measure about 3 feet in length
Hatchlings: 2 inches long
Nest in Florida from late April to September.
Dan estimates that 90-95 percent don’t make it. They either won’t hatch or will be eaten by predators.
We both were excited to see this cycle begin on a dark beach on the west coast of Florida on Oct. 8, 2012
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