babies

I sat in the corral at 4:15 this morning watching the sand crackle and pulse with its 70 hatchlings. To watch the beginning of a life and to recognize its fragility is a powerful thing and it gave my sleep deprived brain more than enough to think about the rest of the morning.

I've been on corral duty the past two nights and I only slept about an hour last night, so pardon me if my post is a bit loopy. Since I have to work tomorrow I didn't want to sleep all day and not be able to sleep tonight so my attempt to distract my body and stay away is leaving me low on energy. Saturday night fortunately went smoothly and between the times I went to check the nests I was able to watch a movie and get a Blizzard with BJ, my second roommate. Sunday morning when I got back to STI there were a few more babies in the closet that were ready to be released so I took a trip to the beach with a couple of our volunteers, one of whom is a camera man for channel 5 (I was less than thrilled when he pulled out the videocamera to shoot footage of me and the babies - windswept hair may be in, but bedhead doesn't really do much for me). Afterwards I crashed and didn't wake up till 5:15 pm only to realize that I had an hour till an intern barbeque and that I was on corral duty again Sunday night. The barbeque was great, there was a ton of great food and I got to see a few old friends, but I was wiped out and periodically had to leave to check the corral. It was a little more complicated than usual because I had to release 20 more hatchlings between the time I spent at the corral and then I had to water all the nests because the sand is so unusually dry. And by the time it all got done I was waking up from an hour long nap to find babies peaking their heads out of nest number 12. Jeff and I dug up two nests around 5:00 and had all the babies counted, measured and weighed by 6:15, which left us a little time to relax before the release. Every once in a while we get lucky and the babies will be especially active by the time we're ready to release them and thank goodness this morning we were lucky. Our 168 little guys were practically racing towards the water and the release was over in 30 minutes, which must be some sort of record for us. With all the babies our hatchling release count is at something like 1200.

There have been a few other exciting or at least noteworthy things going on, but my body is saying it's lunch time so you'll have to wait. So, watch the sunset, enjoy the cool summer breeze - it's another beautiful day.