Share the Beach, Alabama’s sea turtle conservation program recently created a stir with news that volunteers had, for the first time, found evidence that a green sea turtle had laid a clutch of eggs on Dauphin Island. 🐢 Here's how do their vital work:
That green turtle might have gotten the rock-star treatment if she’d hung around to take credit for her work. But as a Wednesday sweep of Dauphin Island’s west end showed, the 18-year-old effort isn’t about making a one-time splash. It’s a meticulous, methodical volunteer-driven approach to making a difference one fragile cluster of eggs at a time.
For Johnson and her crew, the strip of sand close to the water was the focus. Sea turtles swimming northward pull themselves out of the Gulf of Mexico and across the sand using their flippers, which leave a distinctive track known as a crawl. They’re easy to spot, though the turtles don’t necessarily make it obvious exactly where they hid their eggs: They scootch around, flinging loose sand over a much wider area.
The couple of eggs briefly exposed were just the tip of the clutch. A turtle usually lays between 80 and 120, Johnson said, and volunteers have seen up to 150. The wire is to keep the foxes out, Johnson said. Volunteers found they had to upgrade from four-by-four sections to deter these Dauphin Island foxes, but so far that has done the trick. Apparently they don’t like to tunnel in from the side. The mesh is large enough that turtle hatchlings easily can pass through, she said.Volunteers finish documenting and marking a fresh sea turtle nesting site on Dauphin Island's west end.
Sometime during the process, a fox went cantering past, heading from the direction of the public beach toward the wilderness to the west. The animal seemed neither particularly concerned about being in plain view of the human interlopers, nor interested in getting closer to them.
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