Who could have foreseen the BP oil disaster and how it was to affect sea turtle nesting.
The problems it brought were many, here are just a few.
Extra reports and interface with local, state and federal officials as well as with the media.
We watched different owners, condos, and hotels, take action into their own hands to keep the oil out with no regard to sea turtle habitat.
Extra work to do our daily monitoring while every kind of vehicle that was on our beaches day and night.
Working with day and night cleaning to keep everyone on track.
Try to keep all the different agencies on the beach off until we could do our daily monitoring.
Moving nests at the correct time.
Caging nest to prevent hatchlings from going into the oil in the gulf.
Educate folks to what was going on.
People handling, extra effort is given to explain what and why sea turtles do what they do.
And if that was not enough we had nest predated by red fox, coyote and dogs. For the second year in a row we have had domesticated dogs digging up our nests and killing hatchlings, this is a problem to be addressed with Walton County.
ACTUAL NUMBERS
1 Kemps Ridley nest
30 Loggerhead nest
21 false crawls- as you can see this number is more than double or usual number
13 nests relocated to the East Coast
4 nests that hatched into cages and hatchlings moved to the East Coast for release
7 nest were Predated many hatchlings lost
SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL THE VOLUNTEERS OF SOUTH WALTON TURTLE WATCH GROUP FOR ALL THEIR EFFORTS THIS SUMMER, I KNOW IT WAS VERY HARD GOING BUT YOU DID A GREAT JOB AND YOU DO MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE. I WILL KEEP YOU ON FOR NEXT YEAR.