Welcome to Fort Mantanzas National Monument my name's Ranger Ellen and I work with the
National Park Service. Today we are going to talk about sea turtles. It's early in the
morning and I've started walking the beach with my coworker. What are we doing here?
We're looking for sea turtle nests. Now some things that we look for, some signs, one of
the biggest signs we look for are the tracks. If they are diagonal tracks we found a loggerhead
track. Now if they are opposite tracks, we found a green sea turtle track. Those are
the main two turtles that nest on our beach here. And we follow those tracks up from the
ocean up to the dune and when we get up to the dune we've
got to stop and take some pictures.
Sometimes the mom sea turtle she'll get up to the dune and find that it's not a very
good area to nest and she'll actually go back without making a nest. The mama sea turtle
she is very smart, she digs down about a foot to two feet to make sure that her eggs are
nice and safe and that they stay moist under the sand, but also that it doesn't get too
hot or too cold for her babies. That will actually determine the gender of the babies,
because if it's cool or warm. So we want to have a nice good mixture of temperature there
so we get males and females. There's usually over 100 eggs in the nest. And then we put
up the stakes and the flagging so that you know where the sea turtle nest is and you
know not to disturb it. We want to keep those babies sleeping nice and soundly under the
sand for the next two months while they develop. Another thing that we do when we do our sea
turtle walk in the morning, is we pick up trash. And this is something that you can
help us do every day that you come to the beach. You can pick up trash and you can cover
up any holes that you make in the sand. All of those things help our sea turtles survive
until that next generation.