Last night we encountered yet another turtle on Juno Beach. This time it was Katabatik, a turtle that we've seen just once before, in April of 2008. This turtle was named by Lisa, one of the LMC volunteers that watched her nest. She came up just north of the Marinelife Center. Katabatik received a PIT tag in 2008 but it wasn't scanning last night. This rarely happens, normally this is one of our long-term methods of identifying turtles. We are still able to identify turtles from the 2001 season by their PIT tags. Flipper tags don't always last as long. Katabatik still had her flipper tag so we were able to identify her that way. We gave her a new PIT tag and an additional flipper tag. Unfortunately, while we were all watching her nest, two other turtles came up to nest on the south end of our survey area. By the time Chris and Liz headed back down there, they had left. Chris has a theory - "when there's one, there's another one!" meaning if we find one nesting turtle, there's probably another one somewhere on the beach. They seem to like to nest at the same time of night. We're always bummed to miss turtles, but three turtles in one night in March is a good sign for the season to come! We're hoping to stay busy. We just got back from our first ride down the beach for tonight - a very wet ride! There are some pretty bad storms here tonight but we're going to tough it out. I'll let you know how it goes!
