Turtle at sunset

The other night one of our local friends came to our house at about 5:30. He wanted to let us know there was a turtle that was coming up! Courtney grabbed the backpack and we walked down tot he beach where Victor was sitting with our neighbor watching the turtle come up. He came over to us and mentioned that she was walking funny and thought she might be missing her front flipper. Courtney went to go look and she had them all. So we waited for her to come up and nest. First she ran into a log and turned around, except she made a loop and kept going instead of retreating back to the water. Some of the other locals that had come out to watch started moving other logs and beach debris so she wouldn't get spooked again. She did try to nest, that is when we realized it wasn't her front flipper that was not working right it was her back two flippers, she was having a hard time moving them and it looked like they were just dragging in her track. Courtney tried to help her dig her nest but the turtle got spooked again. About and hour and a half after she came up and 100 meters down the beach we figured she had finally given up on nesting for now when she just sat on the beach for a few minutes. Our volunteers were awesome and decided that she needed a lift down to the water because the tide had gone out so far in the amount of time she was up.

This was not the last we saw of the turtle though. A couple hours later while we were on patrol she came up again. I was with our volunteers on the beach and our choice was to sit with the turtle for we didn't know how long or keep walking risk her not laying or being poached. I wanted to try and get her eggs. I did manage to help her dig a deeper hole than what she had done before but she hadn't anchored herself right and began to slip back into her hole. She ended p aborting her nest. We did not tag her earlier because we weren't sure what she was going to do, so I wanted to make sure we got tags on her before we let her go back into the ocean. My two awesome volunteers helped hold her still while I got both her tags on, this way we could also try to find out later if she came back and tried to nest again.