Turtles

Ever since I was a kid I've loved turtles. I think it comes from my Uncle Ted always having at least one turtle. He was living at home while my family and I lived with Grandma for a year while our first home was being built. Anyway I always got to go in his room and watch the turtles, or play with them in the big plastic kiddy pool on the deck. I guess that's where the fascination stems from anyway. Well lucky me, Grenada's Bathaway Beach is one of the endangered Leatherback Turtle's nesting grounds. So after 2 years of living here I finally went!
These pictures aren't from our excursion but they give you a better picture of what we actually saw. The turtles lay at night and you aren't allowed to use white light while they're on the beach because it disorients them, so all the lights were red and made the pictures hard to make out.
First the mother turtle comes up to the beach and scouts out her spot. She uses her HUGE front flippers to settle in. Then she uses her back flippers to dig the nest which is usually about 3 feet deep. It's really neat to watch her dig - her flippers look like delicate hands as she carries up the sand and flips it to the side. It's amazing how careful she is not to get sand back into the nest. Once it's deep enough she starts to lay. She get's pretty still because she enters a hypnotic state, and lays up to 85 eggs in one nest. They lay several nests in one nesting season (late April-June). Then she covers up the nest and presses down using about 2/3 of her body weight (up to 2 tons) to press down the sand. Then she takes about 30-40 minutes moving around and throwing sand with her front flippers again to disguise the nest. Then she heads back into the water.
We didn't get to see the babies hatch. They hatch June -August, but I included the pictures because it's just so neat. Leatherbacks are the largest of all sea turtles. The one we saw was about 5 feet long, but they can get up to about 6 feet long. What's the most amazing part of that is that they subsist on jelly fish. Yeah, who knew anything actually ate those things. They can dive up to 1200 miles and they have been known to travel between Canada and the southern tip of Africa. It was amazing to see one. A definite treat from Grenada!