Sea Turtle Surprise at Sunrise

When Sim got up this morning with my niece Lisa, I was still pretty sleepy, so I took a pass. Big mistake.

Sim and Lisa came back with news that they’d just watched a giant sea turtle leave her nest and return to the Atlantic. I bolted right out of bed, still in my jammies, hair mussed up and headed straight to the beach. 

I missed the old girl. But there was still plenty of activity. A staffer from the Charleston Aquarium was there with volunteers to dig up and move the loggerhead turtle’s nest to higher ground, a few feet straight back into the protected dune.

She’d laid 134 eggs that the staffer, Shannon, carefully dug up and transplanted, careful not to rotate them.

Then they staked out the spot and their work was done.

Sim and Lisa got some great pix of the whole exciting event, a rare treat for vacationers.

We learned we can track the progress of the nest at a site called Folly Turtles – Nest 20.

We’ll try to upload more photos later. Busy morning here and we need to send our pix off to the volunteers whose cameras weren’t in working order. Maybe some of our pix will end up on the Folly Turtles site!

Update: Here are some more pix from the morning, including a screen shot of the Folly Turtles site, which posted one of Sim’s pix. Thanks Nancy!

Here she is, headed back into the water. No estimate on her age, though she has to be at least 30. This photo is courtesy of my niece Lisa….excellent shot: