The "morning turtle" is a highly coveted prize among our research crew here at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center. A morning turtle is one that arrives on the beach in the early dawn hours and stays until sunrise. It is a beautiful sight to watch a leatherback turtle nest with the sunrise behind her and one that we rarely see. Throughout the history of the project, our crew has observed morning turtles only a handful of times since the turtles are generally gone well before this hour. There is now a long-running "joke" in our office because I have yet to see one! I have seen the "twilight" turtle but never a real morning turtle. All of our other research employees, and even some of our seasonal hires have seen a morning turtle, but they have eluded me so far. Not only have I never seen a morning turtle, but the turtles seem determined to keep it this way. I have a history of just missing them, or of being on vacation when it happens. Some nights it's easy to wrap up our surveys at 5:30 or 6:00am because we're cold, tired and just don't feel like there could possibly be any more turtles (because there rarely are at that hour!). It's always on these nights that they come. I head back out around 7:00 to do the morning survey and sure enough, there is a nest that was laid after my last run of the beach. This happened to me last year and I was kicking myself. Well, what I failed to tell you in Thursday's blog was that it happened again! On Wednesday night, after all of my excitement over our first two turtles of the year, I left the beach at around 5:30. I spent the morning training our new hires on how to fill out datasheets and re-stock our field boxes. Sure enough, Christy called around 9:00 from the morning survey to say that there had been another nest after we had finished for the night. They did it to me again! So that actually made for three nests on Wednesday night, not two. One of these days, I'm determined to see the perfect "sunrise turtle!" Maybe this morning?? We're wrapping up the night and haven't seen a turtle yet.
