Mystery Solved

If you recall, a couple weeks ago, we had a visit from Ninja Turtle. This resulted in The Mystery of the Disappearing Turtle. Well, Nancy Drews that we are, we've solved the case. Or maybe Lindsey can be Nancy and Robyn and I can be the Hardy Boys... but I digress. 


Tonight and last night we had the same turtle visit the beach. No, she has not yet laid eggs. She has, however, dug plenty of nests. Last night, she dug five body pits, three of which had nests as well. On her first crawl tonight, she dug ten body pits with nine having nests. When she showed up again around 2 am, she dug four more body pits with three nests. This turtle is insane. We watched her for no less than five hours, tonight alone. 


The manner in which she showed up tonight was also unusual. Around 9:30, Scott (a BICA volunteer), Robyn, Lindsey, and I were laying around talking on our tarp on the beach per normal. Scott abruptly sat up and stared toward the ocean, bewildered to see a stick heading towards him. It was then that he noticed a turtle was making its way up the beach and had the stick somehow wedged between her carapace and flipper (we still don't know how that occurred, the stick fell off shortly after). Not wanting to startle her, we simply hunkered down flat on the tarp as the turtle crawled by not three feet away. She then proceeded to crawl to a palm tree even closer to the tarp and begin digging. When she got tired of that hole, she moved further towards the woods and closer to the hammock where Gene (a BICA worker) was sleeping. This process continued for the next three hours. Robyn, Scott, and I got a spectacular view of the turtle when she crawled back towards the tarp, passing a foot from us and bumping into the duffle bag Scott was crouched behind. Of all the crazy turtles we have encountered on the beach, we feel this is the craziest. We also feel that we have substantial evidence against the local theory that a sea turtle, if it smells humans, will return spooked to the ocean. 


The solving of our mystery, though, comes with the witnessing of three exits from the beach. Namely, this is the fastest turtle we have ever seen. Last night, when Chel tried to touch her to put in a flipper tag, she bolted. I do mean bolted. It took a flying tackle from Lindsey and Robyn to lay hands on the turtle. When we finally let her go, she skittered down to the water faster than I would have thought possible. Same with the first exit tonight. The second exit was even more impressive since she charged down the beach, straight towards Scott, causing him to sprint (yes, I do mean sprint) out of her way. You're missing out if you've never seen a grown man run from a charging sea turtle. Scott maintains that she was also making some sort of hissing noise that he found more terrifying than her speed, which really doesn't help the amount of laughter we get from the situation. 


Back to our case. Normal sea turtle tracks show heavy drag marks in the middle from the carapace with very distinct marks from the front flippers on either side. When this turtle is moving so fast, however, hardly any carapace track can be seen and the flipper marks are widely spaced and indistinct. The flipper marks, in fact, look remarkably like the indentations made by our feet as we wander about the beach. Our theory is that our speedy turtle and ninja turtle are one and the same. If she bolted that first night, we could easily have heard just the briefest rustle as she moved out of the bushes and she would have been long gone in the ocean before we knew she had entirely left the beach. The other strange bit had been that we never found tracks of her leaving the beach. If she was moving fast, though, it seems plausible that we simply didn't know what to look for and obliterated the indistinct tracks the first time we walked through the area desperately trying to see where she'd gone. 


Case closed.