Monday night was a very good one for the project! This season Niki is working for Ecological Associates Inc. on Hutchinson Island (about 40 miles north of Juno) She is monitoring sea turtles for a several ongoing construction projects. The cool thing about her job is that she is working all night on a beach with similar numbers of nesting leatherbacks as Juno Beach. Before the season we contacted the guys who run the projects up there and asked if it would be OK if we tagged a few leatherbacks during the course of Niki's work. They said "great" and we applied for a permit to do the work with the State of Florida.
Well, we got the permit and sent Niki up with a tagging kit and sure enough she finds some leatherbacks - before me!! There were TWO turtles on the beach last night. Niki was able to tag one of them, but was unable to tag the second turtle. The leatherback dug an egg chamber and sat with her tail and flipper in the hole for about an hour, but no eggs. It is interesting that we have seen this before. We have now encountered three early season turtles do the exact same thing. Niki was unable to spend a lot of time with the turtle or tag her as she needed to check the rest of the beach.
Working on Hutchinson Island will allow us to collect a lot of great data this season and we are grateful to Erik Martin and Bob Ernest for allowing us to work up there!
This is going to be an exciting season! Keep checking in for more exciting things we have planned.....
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