Crawl #1
ATV rider Ray called the NEST hotline this morning after finding a crawl in Pine Island (south run). KC (and Frizzle) responded and went to the crawl to check out the activity and sent Ray back on his patrol. Just about half a mile further south, Ray spotted another crawl! Both were determined to be false crawls.
False Crawl#1 - Path highlighted in green. Mom crawled in on the right, scalloped around at the foot of the dune, and headed back to sea on left.
As you can tell from the above picture, this was a HUGE crawl. Mom traveled up from the sea then she scalloped around the fence line. At a few spots it looked like she thought about to nest but then crawled back down and continued to scallop around the dunes. After about 75 feet she decided to turn back to sea without nesting. We are not sure why she did not decide to nest here but hope she soon finds a perfect spot for her nest!
Crawl #2
False Crawl#2 - She came in, crawled up the dune, trampled the plants, and went back without laying eggs.
As you can tell from the pictures above, mom crawled up from the sea directly to the dune. Here, she nestled around a bit then decided this area was not right for her nest and headed back out to sea. We hope to see her return very soon and that she finds a comfortable area for her nest.
Both of these crawls were done before high tide (which was at 10:34 pm), which means that this mom (or moms ??) were out early for nesting turtles.
Due to the close proximity of the two crawls we may be able to conclude this is the same mother who made both of these false crawls. However, after measuring and recording the width of the tracks, we observed that the track width’s are slightly different between the two crawls. So, we might have two mothers about to nest or we might just have one very indecisive mom who is ready to nest!