Sea turtles continued

Female sea turtles lay their eggs during the months of May to November.  A female sea turtle may make 2-3 nests in a nesting season.  Sea turtles come back to the beach where they themselves hatched to lay their own eggs.  A female sea turtle will come out of the ocean at night, make her way slowly up the beach to above the high tide line.  Then she will use her back flippers to dig a hole.  She will deposit 100-150 egg in the hole, cover it up with her flippers and make her way back to the ocean.  She will not care for the nest or the baby sea turtles, they are on their own from here on out.  It takes about 2 months for the eggs to hatch.

Every morning here on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, our resource rangers go on something called "turtle patrol."  They drive on the beach in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, looking for signs that a turtle has come on to the beach and made a nest.  What they will see is very distinctive tracks in the sand that show a turtle has been there.  Once they verify that there is a nest, they rope off the nest area, and mark it with signs to keep people away.  They even take the GPS coordinates of the nest so that they could locate it if a big wave washes the signs away.
Since the rangers know when the nests on Hatteras were laid, they can guess when the baby sea turtles will hatch.  In order to help the baby sea turtles make their way safely to the ocean after hatching, the rangers put a black tarp all around the nest and heading down to the beach.  I have a picture of a nest just down the beach from me that is due to hatch any day:

One reason the tarp is black is that baby sea turtles are attracted to light, whether it be the light of the moon shining on the surface of the ocean, or the light from the rising sun.  The black blocks the light and funnels the sea turtles in the right direction.  What is sad is that in some places where the rangers do not do this for the baby sea turtles, they will sometimes head the wrong way, away from the ocean and towards the lights from people's beach houses!  When this happens the baby sea turtles do not make it to the sea and die.