Turtles, Feb. 17th,

Cape Range national park has the Jurabi turtle centre. It's just an open air pavillion in the scrub near the beach. It has a lot of information about turtles displayed all around. On some evenings they give a talk and slide show then take people down to see nesting turtles. It's similar to the Mon Repos centre on the east coast of Australia, only this time we did see the turtles!

In the moonlight we hiked along the beach in our group until a green turtle was spotted coming up the beach. We sat about 20 metres away to watch her. She took a very long time to dig out her nest: a large depression in the sand. Finally, when she settled down in it, we were allowed to crawl up behind her on our tummies. She was huge, a little less than a metre across the shell. When we checked on her later she was dropping her eggs into a deeper hole she'd dug directly under her cloaca (where the eggs pop out, so we learned from the 10 year old boy who got to help his mom do this volunteer work). The eggs were just like ping pong balls, looking pink in our red torch light.

After she was done (about an hour and 2 sleepy kids later) she crawled back to the sea. We also watched another turtle crawl back to the sea after changing her mind about laying eggs. It takes them a long time, they pull with their flippers a few times then rest. Then they had to deal with the rocks and the waves. It took so long we felt like cheering when the final wave set them free in the sea.

Early the next morning we drove back, avoiding about 40 wallabys near and on the road. That's the time of day everyone here tells you not to drive during. We went slooowww. Back at the turtle beach we were hoping to see some early morning hatchlings scrambling to the water. This time of year the turtles are still laying but hatchlings are also emerging. In the picture there is a turtle nest in front of the girls. If you look closely (click on the photo to enlarge) you will see hundreds of tiny footprints all headed out of the nest and towards the sea. These were baby turtles that hatched during the night. We didn't see any, but we found many footprints and some empty turtle shells. Apparently only 1 in 1000 make it to adulthood, and now some say 1 in 10,000. The girls were keen on coming up with ideas to help save these endangered creatures. It was a wonderful (and sleepy) experience.