A Turtle Walk & Shelling at Blind Pass

The first thing I noticed was the moon, as I walked out onto the beach this morning at 6:15, to go on our 6th turtle walk of this season.

There was a huge cloud, straight in front of me.


This was the view to my left and toward the Sanibel Lighthouse, that always gives me a welcoming blink, when I arrive.

Right away, I was surprised at the size of the piles of manatee grass.

As the sun was coming up, the clouds gradually began changing color. That's one of my favorite parts of the sunrise.



There was a deep row of manatee grass at one of the high tide lines. It was as much as 1 to 2 feet deep in places.









The deep manatee grass was not pleasant to walk in and someone had made a path through this pile of it.

Those scattered clumps along the high-tide line actually have a name - beach wrack - and are an important part of the beach ecosystem. Today there was a lot of beach wrack. There were some curiosities that came in along with the sea grasses.

These things had come in with the newer clumps of sea grasses and were still alive.

I thought this was a piece of some kind of sea grass at first, then I saw it move. Another one of these was swimming in a tidal pool. I saw around 30 or 40 of these. I've been searching, but haven't found a name for this yet.





The two treasures found today. A teeny tiny Turkey Wing and a pretty hibiscus bloom laying on the beach. I'm just not going to discuss the bad things like a nasty pamper floating in a tidal pool and the two full bags of trash that we carried away. These two things made up for that. :-)


Most of the walk was very pleasant today. At first it was cool enough, but about 10 minutes before leaving the beach, it had begun to warm up quickly. We had some rain during the night, so the noseeums were bad at first; but after using the bug spray, they stayed away.

There were no new turtle tracks today. The only tracks were raccoon tracks over the top of the one sea turtle nest in our zone. Thank goodness, it had done no digging into the nest. If all goes well, our nest should hatch around July 10. We got to see the little Plovers again this morning, and I always love watching them and counting to see if they are all still there. I'm not sure, but I think one chick was missing in the second family. Maybe it had just wandered further away from the parents.

Best viewed in HD on YouTube by clicking on the screen below.



This video of the Plover chicks is so cute! I think they will soon be a little too big to squeeze under their Mommy's wings.



Late afternoon we went out to Blind Pass, where we met some friends by the outflow pipe. This is where all the material from the dredging operation ends. We've been hearing reports of some very nice shells being found there. I thought the Grand Daughters would enjoy seeing this. You can see how much sand this operation has been accumulating to re-nourish the beach.



When we first arrived, the outflow pipe was shut down for about an hour. When it restarted it was flowing a little slow, but soon it picked up and the shells started rolling past us. But, seriously we didn't find more than a few of nice quality shells. If you were desperate to get shells, you could have picked up quite a few that had chips out of them, broken edges, etc. We were there about an hour while the water was flowing and I brought home only a few. Now, that doesn't mean that a great shell didn't go floating by someone else. :-)



After we were there for about a half hour, a guy on a Bobcat came and raised the pipe. Although we ended up with only a few treasures today, it was a fun time with the girls.