Our Mission, Should We Choose To Accept It... 12-1-2018

Turtles are coming in at an alarming rate this year. Over 700, as I type this (Dec. 4th). Loggerheads have started coming in, even on "our" island. We made ourselves available for the weekend, which we always do. We got a call Friday to see if we could go out to the point of our island to retrieve a "floater", a device that measures tides and wind and is useful to see what natural occurrences are moving the cold-stunned turtles. We said OK... how bad could it be?

The floater was about 3 1/2 miles out. Hey, we go that way anyway.


The water was calm and we didn't expect many turtles. The sunrise was quite pretty. (We had left the house at 4 AM).


I added a couple of birds to the year on the way out but mostly, we kept our eyes open for turtles as we made our way along the beach. Here's an arty shot of Andrea doin' her thing.


Finally, we got out to where the floater should be. I walked up the harbor side, thinking it might be out that way. It was. I loaded it on to my sled and made my way back toward Andrea.

One thing I hadn't counted on... it was heavy as hell. The big canvas sail was soaking wet and sand covered and the whole shebang was over 100 lbs.

I parked the sled and continued, unencumbered, out to the point with Andrea. She had found a cold-stunned cabbage while I was dragging the floater over.


We found three deceased Kemp's Ridley's on our way out. They had been stuck in the middle for a while and were very dead. Out at the point, we watched Eiders and Gulls and wondered why there were no seals present. Or were there?


We headed back, gathering up the dead turtles as we proceeded to the sled. It saddens me that I feel that I have become desensitized. Four years ago, all of these dead turtles would have made me cry but this day, I was carrying them like schoolbooks, just trying to get them safely to the sled to wrap them up and drag them back. Bringing them in is just something that has to be done and we do it unblinkingly.


One more Kemp's was found, one that we'd missed on the way out. It too was dead.

It started to feel like I was single-handedly destroying the alive/ dead ratio on the year.

It was very slow going. I was moving at Andrea speed and my back was achin' before too long. Still, I tried to enjoy the beauty around me (as I carried dead turtles and a massive floater)...

Blue.


Sand painting.


We finally got the sled back (though getting it up the steep, eroded sand dune was quite the effort and I had to take an "I can't breath" rest for a few minutes) and took the load back to the sanctuary. Evidently, I didn't need to bring the sticks and sails of the floater back but leaving it there would have felt like littering. There were students visiting so the dead turtles were taken for dissection pretty quickly. The good news was, two live Loggerheads had come in while we were out there!


Our friends Tim and Kim were there and they had the pleasure of taking these ones to the aquarium. The top one tried to climb off of the cart while being wheeled to Tim's car!

We stuck around to make some pick-ups. We had to go back to "our" island to pick up 3 more Kemp's. When we got there, the woman was petting one of them hopefully but I could see from the car that they were all dead. We gave her and her husband the ol' "You never know!" but these three were definitely already gone.

Just as we were leaving to head home, a call came in from a beach in Dennis that we know and we decided to go grab that one before hitting the highway. I'm glad we did because the woman there had pulled a small Kemp's off of the beach and it was alive!

We took it back to the sanctuary, relieved that we'd ended the day on a live note.

We got home 16 hours after we left the house and I was toast. I went to bed at 6:30 PM and slept for 12 hours.

So, since Tim goes by the nickname of Box Turtle Tim, I'm thinking of adopting Dead Turtle Mike. It doesn't have the cachet of Tim's name but it seems horribly accurate this year.