chasing turtles

Last night I came across a "false crawl" (A false crawl is when a turtle crawls up the beach and turns around without nesting) in MacArthur park on my first pass south. Knowing the turtle would be back shortly, I waited for a bit at the south end before proceeding north on the ATV. On my way back north I found another crawl about a kilometer to the north. This one was barely out of the water. I waited once again for her to come back and sure enough, a leatherback popped out of the water a few hundred meters to the north. I waited for her to get up the beach and start nesting and then checked her tags. No flipper tags, but she did have a PIT tag. It was "Ara" a turtle only observed during the 2002 season. The funny thing is that she did the same exact thing back then! She also made a crawl up the beach before turning around and trying again. Even more interesting is that she nested in almost the same exact spot as she did in 2002!

On another run down the beach at about 5am, I encountered another crawl up near Marcinski Road in Jupiter. Great - I instantly thought I was going to have a morning turtle! Spent the rest of the morning wandering the beach, but she never came back. The sunrise was nice and I took a few images of the leatherback nest. Maybe I will post one later.