Hundreds of turtles saved by volunteers
By Andrea Stetson, Special to The News-Press
Published by news-press.com on August 21, 2004
Turtle Time volunteers rescued hundreds of loggerhead turtle hatchlings from the wrath of Hurricane Charley, and even used a high-tech global positioning system to find some of the nests.
In the days before and right after Charley, the volunteers saved nearly 750 turtles from certain death.
“We never thought these would be here,” said Angie Ralph, a Turtle Time volunteer. “We really thought they would be gone.”
The eggs survived being washed over by high surf and storm surge, but the sand on top of them was reduced to almost nothing. Without the usual 9-inch covering, the young hatchlings would be in danger.
“There was not even a half inch over the eggs,” Ralph said. “When we walked by, we saw their flapping wings. We knew they would be eaten by birds and fire ants because it was an exposed nest.”
So volunteers removed the newborns, which usually remain in the nest for one to three days, letting them finish their nesting process in moist buckets.
Ralph said 27 hatchlings were saved from a nest that hatched Wednesday. Another 77 were saved Thursday.
Before the storm hit, volunteers rescued 640 young from Bonita and Fort Myers beaches that had hatched, but were still in the nest. Those quarter-sized turtles rode out the storm in buckets and boxes that lined Ralph’s garage. They were released after the storm.
All the nest markings were washed away, so volunteers used GPS to locate them. There were 81 nests laid on Bonita Beach this year; 40 hatched before the storm. Fort Myers Beach had 24 nests, including eight that hatched before the hurricane.
It is uncertain how the turtles fared on Sanibel Island.
“We know we have lost some of our nests,” said Eve Haverfield, president of Turtle Time. “But on a brighter note, we are seeing nests hatch. We don’t know how long they were under water, but some have survived.”
Haverfield said the slant of the beach, sea oats and sea weed contributes to good drainage, which prevented some of the nests from being washed out.
In Collier County, only 33 of the 171 nests on Keewaydin Island hatched before the storm. Dave Addison, who monitors turtles there for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, believes about 100 nests were lost, but more than 30 might have survived. One nest has hatched since the storm, sending 93 young to the Gulf.
“That was one bit of good news,” Addison said. “We really got hammered. We’ve been doing this 23 years and we’ve never had anything like this.”
Naples Beach lost 42 of its 60 nests. Turtle experts from Collier County’s Department of Natural Resources are trying to locate nests on the rest of Collier County’s beaches using GPS.
“We lost markers for 378 nests,” said Maura Kraus, senior environmental specialist for Collier County Natural Resources.
Five nests have hatched since the storm and two were poached by raccoons, Kraus said.
Like Turtle Time, Kraus and her staff are rescuing hatchlings from the nests as soon as they hatch because there is no sand covering to protect them. Kraus expects more nests to hatch through nesting season, which is over by the end of October.
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