Courtesy of Panama City News Herald
We check the beach every morning during the summer for the tracks of turtles that nested the previous night. The surveys are performed on all-terrain vehicles by members of the Turtle Watch program. The loggerhead tracks are about 3 ft wide, so they are easy to find. Sometimes the turtle will not lay eggs when she crawls onto the beach. This is called a ‘false’ crawl and happens about one-third of the time. Tracks with a large area of disturbed sand indicate the presence of a nest which can be seen in the picture above. Nests are sometimes found by tourists who exhibit creative ways of marking the location of the eggs. The nest below was found by a child on Carillon Beach. He marked the eggs with a charcoal arrow and a protective perimeter of seaweed and sticks.
