Sea Turtle Hatchlings!

Hi Everyone!

Yesterday was a big day for me!  I got to attend a Sea Turtle nest evacuation with the Resource Rangers.  The Resource Rangers are the rangers who monitor wildlife here in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
The nest that we visited had already had 70+ sea turtle hatchlings emerge and go to the sea 3 days before.

What your seeing in this picture is the ranger beginning to dig out the turtle nest.  He knew where to dig because of that white pole sticking out of the ground and also because when this nest was located they buried a GPS device to help them find the nest.

What the ranger did was carefully dig down until he began to find empty sea turtle eggs.  He put them in piles of 10 to make it easy to count them:

Eventually, he began to find sea turtle hatchlings that were going the wrong way underground.  They were trying to dig horizontally instead of heading up to the surface of the sand.  He carefully took those turtles out and placed them in a container where they could be kept safe until nighttime when they could be released into the ocean.  Sea turtles make their way to the ocean at night to keep from being eaten by birds or fish.

Here is a hatchling in the ranger's hand.  Notice how he is trying to crawl away!  The babies instinctively know to move to the sea and then will swim for at least 2 days straight to get to the open ocean once they are in the ocean.
12 live sea turtle babies were recovered from the nest.  Here they are together:

Now, when I left the nest site, I knew they were going to release the babies into the sea soon, but I did not have any idea when.  This story is not over!  Stay tuned and my next blog will tell what happens next!