2019 is winding down...

I've been neglecting this blog . So what?

We always say that we'll be ready to walk beaches on Thanksgiving Day. A lot of folks want to have family time, so we make ourselves available. And, of course, we got asked to walk Thanksgiving. The weather was supposed to suck again (though not as bitterly cold as last year's debacle). Cold and rainy and windy. We were also asked to walk the high tide in the middle of the night, so we booked a hotel nearby and decided to make a really tiring day of it.

High tide was at 12:30 in the afternoon on Thanksgiving. We got there on time and tried to hit the beach, but the surf was pounding into the dunes, well above any high-tide we'd walked before.

We walked the gut for a bit and found a few spaces where we could get to the "beach", or at least see where turtles might come in.

It was miserable. The rain kept spitting, even though the weather forecast said it was supposed to stop. The "gusts of 35 to 50 MPH" was a constant, high wind, enough to hold up my fat 215 lb. ass. And that surf was relentless. There was almost no beach along the first 2 miles of the Island. Needless to say, we saw no turtles.

The high surf was making the erosion pretty scary. I walked over these fallen piles of rock and clay to look beyond but Andrea said she could still see bits crumbling and falling as I was out there.

2 hours after high-tide and the waves were still smashing into the dunes and cliffs. We deemed it too dangerous to continue and turned back a little less than 3/4 of the way out. The point would have been completely underwater anyway.

We checked into our hotel and peeled off oursoaked clothing. We'd been invited to Thanksgiving dinner at the Sanctuary's dorms and I had to wear a pair of Andrea's stretchy pants because I had no dry ones. That's OK... everyone was cool there and I even got to dry my sweatshirt in their drier. It turns out that no turtles had come in, despite the heavy winds. It seems the waves churned so much that anything would have been pulled back out.

Dinner was excellent, talking with friends... Tim and Kim were there, so I got some good talkin' time in with them. A BBC film crew was there for a production they're working on and they had good stories. It was decided that, due to the super-high-tide, that the midnight walks should head out a couple of hours after high tide. Fair enough. We'd get more sleep that way. Lights were out by 8 PM.

We got up at 2 AM and got into our more or less dry clothes. The room's heater did a decent job on drying my pants. We bundled up and got to the beach at about 2:30 AM.

This was our first full-island night walk and it was pretty weird because all of our usual landmarks were gone. But it wasn't too bad. The wind had died down a bit and at least it wasn't raining. We saw a lot of this, though. (That's sand, not icy rain!)

We only knew we'd hit the point because a bunch of light colored birds took off, probably gulls and Eiders. Then we headed back. We found no turtles along the way. We didn't even see any wrack line. Everything had indeed been pulled back out. We got back to the starting point just as first light was starting to peek out. That's usually when we got there to start... it felt weird ending at this point.

Obviously, we had become pretty hungry by this time. Two (well, one and 3/4) long beach walks, about15 miles of wet sand and wind-fighting in about 18 hours... we'd earned a breakfast. We went to a nice place as the sun came up and talked about how I was about to write my first blog post with no animals in it! Then we got a call. They had a few turtles already and a few more coming in and needed us to drive a some to the aquarium on our way home. So, we ate up and headed over to the sanctuary.

One turtle was very interesting. It's a Kemp's Ridley, a massive one at that- almost 50 pounds! We usually get 3 pounders, or so. But more interesting was the fact that this poor turtle was suffering from fibropapillomatosis, a disease which causes tumors to grow. This turtle's tumors aren't too bad but it is the first case we've seen of the disease up here. It has only been seen on turtles in the tropics before. This was a special turtle, indeed. Add to that, a healed wound that looks like a shark bit a chunk out of the rear-left shell. This one is a warrior.

There was also a live Loggerhead waiting to go to rehab.

This guy was a little more active.

The new car got put to good use. I got it to fit more turtles and here we were, only putting two in. But it was over 80 pounds of chelonia, so we were glad the Corolla didn't attempt this move.

I was filmed driving up to get the turtles... wonder if I'll be in the BBC documentary!

We kept the temp at 55° for the 90 mile drive to the aquarium and dropped off our cargo. The staff was very interested in the Kemp's. They will (or already have, I haven't heard) perform surgery on the tumors and hopefully, it will make a full recovery.

We got home and napped. For a few days.

Because we're gluttons for punishment, we answered the call again for high tide the following weekend, on Sunday the 8th. It was an afternoon high-tide and the weather was pretty agreeable. Of course, we knew we'd see no turtles, but duty is duty, so we headed out.

I finally got to triple digits on my 2019 bird count, with #100 being Sanderlings and #101 being Dunlins. There were plenty of both out there.

Not many seals this time, either, though a few watched us from afar.

Nope, it was quiet and I had time to get artsy-fartsy.

It was a quiet and pleasant walk but the devastation from the previous week was very evident. This "island" wont be here forever and it took a huge hit. The erosion was epic.

So, that was that. No turtles had come in, so none had to be transported.

The light turtle year has continued. Only 289 as I type this (Dec. 17th). That is good and bad, I guess. Hopefully, it means they just didn't get caught in the cold and made it past the Cape and headed South. Anything that comes in from here on out will probably be dead. We'll probably get back on the beach this year (we're a favorite clean-up crew) but the hope of any live rescues is remote. Still, necropsy season is right around the corner and even the dead turtles provide a lot of information. Perhaps some will shed some light on this year's low number of strandings.

As a side note, it had been warmer and rainy the following weekend. Saturday the 14th was in the 50s! So on Sunday, December 15th, despite a frigid wind, we went to look for salamanders nearby, hoping to actually see a live animal. Well, we saw no salamanders but Andrea spied this female Garter Snake just outside her den, trying desperately for some sun. She only had intermittent luck.

Very healthy looking... "in good flesh" as my former lizard's vet used to say. I poked her to make sure she was still alive and she sure was. 

That was a nice bonus. Also, our 21st straight month with a Massachusetts snake sighting. March, 2018 was our last MA Snake-free month (though we saw a ton in Florida that month).

I hate Winter. And it isn't even Winter yet!