Special Day!

What a special day! Subbing for another patroller at Santa Rosa, I discovered not one, but two sea turtle nests! Just look at the size of the body pit and nest area!

The first nest I discovered belonged to a green sea turtle with a 42" crawl width.

As you can see, she did a bit of crawling around to find the right spot, but unfortunately nested much too close to the water and the nest had to be relocated.

The fun part was discovering that she laid 145 eggs!

The second nest was a loggerhead. Her nest was around 35 feet from the water, but it was in an area with higher elevation to it, so it remained where it was laid.

There was a very high tide today which was causing one nest to get washed over, as was as some areas of bird colonies, but hopefully the water will drain quickly and cause no lasting problems for either the sea turtles or birds.

My sign at the second nest.