Revised Turtle Nest at Town Hall

This post has been revised with additional links and information.(see note below)
While walking the beach this morning I happened into a marvelous scene. A Network for Endangered Sea Turtles (NEST) volunteer had noticed a turtle crawl. A loggerhead turtle had come up the beach and laid eggs in the sand. The turtle then crawled around and headed back down the beach and out to sea. You can see the U shaped track of the crawl in the photo. The nest area is on the left side of the picture, in the middle going top to bottom. The nest is located about 50 yards south of the Town Hall beach access Milepost 14 in Nags Head. The eggs will probably have to be moved since the nest is so close to the ocean. As the lower photo shows the nest has been moved higher on the dune line. Hopefully this will keep the eggs from being washed away.
I was told that this was a loggerhead nest as opposed to a green turtle nest because the flipper tracks on the beach are parallel to each other rather than offset. This has been a good year for turtle nests. There is another recent nest in the vicinity of Ida St. in SoNag (South Nags Head for the uninitiated). Additional nests have been located in Corolla and just north of Coquina Beach. That makes this a good year for turtle nests.
NEST volunteers ride the entire beach every day looking for crawl signs. The Town of Nags Head has a contract with NEST that provides the group with an ATV every few years and some financial support. The group also performs services for the town checking for turtle nests when such a check is required for CAMA permitting. Monticello (hereinafter known as The Locoolest Local Blogger or TLLB for short; sorry Ronnie and Paula!) wrote a nice piece about NEST just last week.

I have posted more photos to a larger slide show at my Picasa Web Album. You can see all the pictures and at my Photo Blog .
Boy this is a great place to live.
Ciao!

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NOTE:I didn't have time to flesh out this post yesterday. I wanted to get the photos up but didn't really have time to do it justice. Hope this is better.