Last night's turtle (Speedy/formerly known as Ninja Turtle) returned tonight!
Let me recap last night: The fastest turtle in the world crawled up, dug five nests, got flipper tags, and the sprinted back to the ocean.
At 9:15 pm tonight, this same turtle back climbed up the beach right by our tarp. As in, we could have touched her from where we were lying. She then crawled right into the middle of the camp and started to dig the her first nest of the night. It would not be the last by a long shot.
She moved to a new place and started digging again. This new spot was directly in front of the hammock where Gene, the ProTECTOR employee was sleeping. As we got near 10 pm, he got out of his hammock and started to the beach--totally unaware that there was a turtle nesting not ten feet from him. Luckily, Lindsey was able to stop him before he turned on his light or stepped on the turtle!
After this the turtle proceeded to wander around camp, randomly digging nests. At one point, she circled back over to where are tarp was sitting and even ran smack into the big duffle bag! Behind this bag, Scott (a BICA volunteer), Amy, and I were all hunched down on the ground, biting our lips to keep from laughing. After this, things got less interesting for a while, so Amy and I slept for about the next two hours. We were only awakened because the turtle was headed back to the beach, and she was considering crossing our tarp. Luckily, she ended up going around us and entered the water again at 12:15 am, a full three hours after coming out of the water! During that time she dug ten different body pits, with nine completed nest chambers. (The body pit is the initial, rather wild digging and then the nest chamber is a much narrower, more carefully done hole that the eggs will be laid in.) Ten nests is just one short of the recorded high for Hawksbill Sea Turtles, which is eleven nests in one crawl.
We all settled down for the rest of the night on the beach, not expecting anything else to happen. We were wrong.
At 2:45 am, we were awakened by Scott who told us that they thought "that crazy turtle was back." Speedy was indeed back, having climbed up the beach about 25 meters from our camp. She was rustling around in the bushes for quite awhile and we thought that she was finally going to lay eggs. No, we weren't that lucky. She dug four more nests before wandering right up to where we were standing (for those of you counting at home, this brings the count up to 13 nests in one night for this turtle and, as far as we can tell, a new record). Not only did this turtle false crawl twice in one night (very unusual) and dig more nests than have been recorded before for this species, but at one point she crawled up and sat on my foot. This was one confused turtle.
Finally, Lindsey decided that we might as well take the pictures we needed of the turtle's carapace and head scales (these are used as part of a turtle database for identifying individual turtles). After this, the turtle finally realized that there were humans standing around her and started for the water at top speed. However, about half way between her and the ocean was Scott. As soon as he saw the 100+ lbs turtle coming at him, he turned and ran, barely getting out of the way before she barreled through and into the ocean!
Lindsey pointed out that no one will believe us when we tell the story of exactly how fast this turtle was and maybe she's right. However, there are now a group of researchers that will swear up and down that there is one Honduran turtle that could definitely beat any rabbit in a race.
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