Julie has sorted through her pictures from Monday nights leatherback turtle release on Sanibel Island and we’re posting the best of them here. For those who didn’t read the earlier post a leatherback turtle nest hatched on Sanibel Island, Florida in the early morning hours on Monday and 90 of the 94 baby turtles made it to the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately for us four of them were unable to get out of the nest and were rescued and released on Monday night.
I believe this is the first recorded leatherback turtle nest south of Sarasota Florida so it was a really big event. The release was attended by about 100 local turtle volunteers as well as local media. If you want to see the some of the local media coverage our earlier post includes some video from NBC-2.
The stars of the evening arrive - Amanda Bryant and her red bucket of baby turtles
Look at the smile on this baby leatherback turtle
Turtle Time's Eve Haverfield with one of the babys
One of the babies demonstrating its swimming technique
All of the babies in a bright red bucket
The crowd beginning to gather about an hour before the release
The sun is beginning to set - it's getting closer to release time
As darkness began to fall we were instructed to turn off all cameras so there would be no light to distract the turtles. We all gathered around a staked off “runway” and the four turtles were released. It took them about 10 minutes to work their way down the eight feet or so of beach and fight their way through the light surf to get into the gulf. As the last turtle disappeared into the gulf there was an excited round of applause and the evenings festivities came to an end.
Julie compiled all of this into a YouTube video which can be seen here.
For more information on the release, from the perspective of a Sanibel Island Turtle Tracker, please see Sanibel Toots wonderful blog. Her blog post details what happened earlier in the day up on Sanibel.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wonderful post! My favorite photo of all, is the little smiling turtle. Doesn’t that just sum the whole affair?
That’s funny – it does indeed sum up the whole affair. Julie noticed that smile as soon as she took the picture and it’s our favorite as well!