V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N

Guest post by C. I'm on vacation with K this week. She asked me to post some pictures.

Lovely beach weather.

A great place to enjoy a good book. 

 K brought a load of great eating from her garden, including this enormous cabbage head. 

This week we were lucky enough to have a wonderful biology lesson just over our dune cross over.   Topsail Island is the nesting site for a couple of sea turtle breeds.  Turtle volunteers on the island have been helping to protect turtle nests and turtles for over 20 years.   Here is a loggerhead nest that hatched three days ago.  The volunteers walk the beach looking for turtle tracks every day.    They verify that there is a nest and mark it.  Nests hatch typically 60 days after they are laid.  When the time is close, they sit out and watch the nest.   They watched this one for days but missed the hatchout.  

The turtle volunteers build a ramp to the sea when a turtle nest is ready to hatch. 

These are some turtle tracks where some of the straggling hatchlings came out the night before and made their way to the sea.

After three days the turtle volunteers dig out the nest and count the hatched and unhatched eggs.  

This nest had 103 hatched eggs.  This is the first little hatchling they found.  The nest turned out to be very deep, almost three feet down. 

They found 9 of the 103 adorable little hatchlings as they dug out the nest. 

We got to watch them scamper to the sea when they let them go (those four little dark blobs are turtles that had already been let go).  We have been going to this beach for several years and have seen these marked turtle nests.  It was exciting to get this up close view.