Conjoined Eggs

Today was rather slow, only one nest on North Beach.  Steve said the body pit was extra long and after working on it for a while, he didn't find any eggs.  He left to patrol the rest of the beach, and after finding nothing, returned with fresh eyes.  He probed another spot on her exit crawl, between a tree and sea wrack and there it was.  It wasn't the suspected place by any means, so it just goes to show that perseverance pays off.

On South Middle this morning, I found several alligator tracks.  More activity than I've ever noticed before.  One huge track came from the ocean and across the dune, over our ATV road, and back into the marsh.  It's fun to see all the different animal tracks on the beach every morning.  There's so much activity overnight.  After I finished patrolling, I walked south from the ATV road to check on some possible bird nesting activity for Tim.  He noticed some Least Terns hanging out just south of an Oystercatcher nest (see picture) and wanted to know if they're still there.  I saw them a few days ago, before I knew what was going on, and thought I'd check on them again.  The terns were flying about, not like I saw them before.  It was later in the day when I saw them laying in the dune, so we'll have to check back at a later time.  

After taking it easy until after lunch, we headed outside for some chores.  We painted stakes, cleaned up some old bottles we've collected, finished cleaning "junk" from our shed cleaning day, and reviewed our sea turtle supplies.  We cut up the last of the plastic hardware cloth roll and assembled them to the remaining plastic screens.  Only 14 sets left, so yesterday, Adam brought us some old metal screens from Sapelo to hold us off until our order shows up from Canada.  Around 11:30, two guys from GADNR Coastal Resources came to test our beaches' water quality.  We won't know the results for a bit, but if the water here isn't safe, then nowhere is safe.  I hope they had fun on their Ossabaw adventure today.

With nothing else today to share, I wanted to write about the interesting find I had yesterday.  In nest NB68, I found several odd eggs.  Some were larger than normal, a few were chicken egg shaped, and a pair were conjoined.  One is smaller than the other, so I wonder if one is a spacer egg.  I've seen pictures and read about conjoined sea turtle hatchlings, so we'll have to wait and see.  You can see a picture here and read about a story here.