I did a happy dance this morning when I discovered my second sea turtle nest of the week. This loggerhead was all business! She came straight up on the beach, nested, and headed straight back into the Gulf.
The body pit, which is very evident in this photo, was 6' 7" across.
To give you some sense of scale, the width of her track was 37" wide.
I immediately called the bio-techs to alert them I'd found another nest. I wasn't sure if it would need to be relocated. Then I posted a sign and then headed off to complete the rest of my patrol just in case there were other nests or false crawls.
By the time I returned to work on the nest (measurements, staking, reporting), bio-techs Rebecca Carruth and Toby Singleton arrived to assess the situation, along with volunteer Emily Kennedy. Rebecca was a welcome sight on Sunday when my Ft. Pickens nest had to be relocated.
Even though the decision was made to leave the nest "in situ" - it's original location - Rebecca digs down to locate the egg chamber itself so that it can be GPS'd. She then replaces the sand and leaves a light hand print for reference when they return with the GPS equipment.
The whole team of Bio-techs and volunteers are thrilled with the number of nests we've had so far this year - and we haven't even gotten into the peak of our season! But we realize there will be a lot of sleepless night in a couple of months when all these nests start hatching!
Measurements taken, nest roped off, reporting completed on SR 6081. Time to head home.
Life is good!
What a fantastic morning! I discovered a sea turtle crawl at Ft. Pickens and the mama turtle appeared to have nested. We know that it was a female coming ashore to nest because males never return to land after they have hatched and entered the water.
Unfortunately the nest was laid not far from the water and had to be relocated. At the time I discovered it, the nest was 20' from the water line, right in the middle of the wrack line. By the time the nest was excavated, it was 7' from the water line! Timing is very important when it comes to moving a nest, especially one this low.
The crawl pattern was a bit difficult to dicipher, but I'm leaning toward a loggerhead even though the tracks looked pretty symmetrical. A loggerhead has an alternating track. A Green sea turtle has a symmetrical track, but displays a tail drag (unlike what is pictured here).
Since sea turtles are a threatened or endangered species, volunteers may now only assist to a certain degree when it comes to an excavation and relocation. Bio-tech Rebecca Carruth came straight from her own patrol at Santa Rosa to help me and began to assess the situation. 
We carefully dug down through the sand until we reached the eggs (Rebecca was right on the money when guessing where the eggs were deposited!). Sand from the nest was added to the bottom of our container and the eggs were gently lifted from the nest with as little movement as possible, taking care to avoid any rotation of the egg itself. 
A close up of sea turtle eggs. They look exactly like ping-pong balls, don't they? And they appeared to be about the same size.
Rebecca lays the eggs in rows of 10, careful to keep them in order. The eggs will be placed in their new nest, created by Rebecca, about 150 feet north of the current location. They will also be placed in the nest in the exact same order they were removed from the original nest so that the bottom eggs will still be on the bottom and the top eggs will remain on top. 
Approximately 60 days from now we should have ninety-nine tiny hatchlings emerge from this nest. We will be there to help them into the Gulf of Mexico and try to increase their rate of survival in the meantime by carefully monitoring the nest each day for any signs of predation, such as ghost crabs or other island critters such as raccoons, fox, opposum, and coyotes.
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