Turtle Season

Starting late November and through the new year, turtles come ashore to lay eggs. Its a fascinating process to watch, as she laboriously climbs up the beach above the high tide mark and finds the right spot in the dunes. Then she digs a hole, which can take several hours, lays the eggs, covers them up and crawls back down the beach exhausted. I've witnessed it close up on several occasions at Heron Island and Mon Repos.

Heron Island is fun during turtle season, especially once they start hatching. You are supposed to turn all the lights out: lights confuse the baby turtles and they end up getting lost. There are always some lights on though, which means baby turtles running all over the resort, and people gathering them up in buckets and helping them on their way to the water.

But we get turtles here on the mainland near Tannum Sands as well. This season has been exceptional for the number of turtles: on Heron Island they had over two hundred in one night come ashore to lay. There just isn't enough space on Heron for all those eggs, they end up digging up existing nests, so the rangers have been gathering up eggs and relocating them to the mainland.

The numbers are definitely on the increase: the various conservation programs help, but perhaps also because a lot of the big fish which predate on the hatchlings have been fished out, and jellyfish, which are a staple food, are on the increase.

So this year one comes ashore right on the main beach in front of the surf club in the early evening. The nippers (junior surf life savers) were all there training at the time.

Wild Cattle Island is the national park just south of Tannum, and I assumed it would be a good place for turtles: ten km of deserted white sand beach and dunes. Sure enough, a couple of months ago I was walking down there and there were fresh tracks running up into the dunes. Its a very distinctive trail, the body making a central groove, with the flippers flailing on either side. So for the last couple of weeks I've been going down there to see if anything had popped up.

The last few nights have been full moon, and sure enough, there were a number of freshly hatched nests, the empty shells lying around. I counted half a dozen nests in a hundred meters of beach, there were probably more further down.

So I'm expecting a lot more turtles on the mainland in future years.