Wow!!

I am very happy to report that we had an insane night out there! 15 turtles in our survey area!!! It was the second busiest night in the history of the project (April 22nd, 2009 still wins with 17 turtles). The only down side to such a fantastic night - it seems that all of the turtles nested at the same time and it was EARLY so we missed several of them. Andrew found Eve at around 9:30 on the north end of Juno. Christy called at about 9:45 to say that she had a new turtle at the south end of Juno. Just after leaving that turtle, she found Espina nesting. As she continued down the beach after working up two turtles, she saw two nests in MacArthur Park that she hadn't made it to. Next was Prissy in MacArthur. Shocked that there had been three turtles in the park, she continued on. Amazingly, there were three more missed nests! 6 nests in MacArthur Park before 11:00!! Unfortunately we missed five of them. Next, Andrew found Alice just north of the pier. Alice was just here ten days ago but this time she didn't stay. She left after a quick false crawl. He called about an hour later to say that he had TWO turtles in front of him. Alice had returned but again, she didn't stay. As she left, he quickly checked on the other turtle. This turtle was Jupiter, a turtle that we originally tagged in 2002 and saw again in 2006 and 2008. She also false crawled. Both turtles came up on a very narrow stretch of beach without any good nesting sand. Jupiter emerged again about an hour later in the exact same spot but once again, didn't stay. Christy made it to Singer Island to find another missed nest and on her way back, found two new turtles on Juno Beach and MacArthur Park . I worked up a new turtle nesting in front of the marinelife center at around 3:30am. We rounded out the evening with 15 total turtles on our survey area, 9 that we saw.