Turtles, Turtles and Turtles

We had a great experience this year at the beach, watching turtles hatch and make their way to the ocean.  The first night we arrived, Marci and I were walking on the beach when we noticed a crowd of people moving up and down the beach with a bunch of red lights.  It looked weird and we were wondering if it was a bunch of kids messing around or something, but as we got closer, we could see a path was built down the beach and the crowd was helping to guide the newborn turtles to the ocean.  Which was just the start of our adventure of trying to help the kids see the same thing...

There was a volunteer group of people who would stake out the turtle nests and then check them everyday to see if they had been disturbed, and then around day 80, would start showing up in the evening to wait for the nest to "boil" and get the turtles to the ocean.  They were a little intense about their devotion to the turtles and would yell at us if we talked to loud, used flashlights, or used flash on our cameras.  They were concerned that the lights and/or sound would distract the turtles from getting to the ocean!

Our crazy kids - having fun and making faces.

We had about a dozen nests on the beach around us and quite a few of them were due to boil while we were in town.  So, we would get the kids and head out every night, hoping to see the turtles hatch.  It took quite awhile, but we finally saw the turtles hatch, although not at night.  We found that after the nest boiled, the volunteers would return three days later to dig out the egg shells to count the number of hatches and to free any turtles that were not strong enough to dig out.  We took the kids to the egg counting and saw a number of turtles that were not able to dig out, which the volunteer freed and we watched it scoot down the beach to the ocean.

My guess is that most of them were lunch for some sea creature...but I did not share that with the kids!

It was a great experience and one that we just lucked into.  I'm not sure if we'll ever see that again, and was a great item that might've been on our bucket list.