I Found the First Sea Turtle Nest of the Season on Bonita Beach

Or...The Dragon feels validated as a human today

A Loggerhead sea turtle made my day. She came up on shore on Bonita Beach, in Zone 11, some time during the night, trudged clear up to the grassy area, made a nest, laid some eggs, covered it with plenty of fluffy sand, and trudged back to the Gulf like a pro. What's totally cool about this is she's the first to do so along Bonita Beach this year and she did it in a zone I patrol on a night I'd find the nest.

Woo-hoo!

Here are pictures to commemorate the coo-el event. The image that looks like a set of tractor trailer marks is the picture of her "crawl." If you're ever walking on the beach and you see a set of these, you know you're witnessing something great. You're seeing evidence that an endangered or threatened species has been at work. If you follow the tracks up the beach, you'll come to an area of greatly disturbed sand. Under all that disturbance are 90 or so tiny little gestating reptile lives. How cool is that?

Other Turtle Time volunteers and I will be keeping an eye on this nest throughout the summer. Within the next 70 days, I'll report on a hatching event for you!

As a side note, a reporter from The News Press called me to ask "How excited were you to find the first nest?" Sigh. I could talk ad nauseum about fibropapilloma tumors killing our turtle population at large and five years of sea turtle patrol and she asks me: "How excited were you to find the first nest?" So I answered her questions very politely. There wasn't really an opportunity to say I include sea turtles in my writing or to tell her that I'm a local author. Bummer. But, you know, today was about promoting sea turtle conservation, not pimping Sandy Lender's writing career. :)

Now I must go because I need to call everyone I know.

"Some days, I just want the dragon to win."

Tags: sea turtle, Loggerhead, Bonita Beach, fibropapilloma, Sandy Lender