THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 8, 1996 TAG: 9608080419
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 76 lines
On a busy stretch of Oceanfront beach, wildlife biologists Wednesday found a rarity - a nest containing 123 eggs from a federally protected loggerhead sea turtle.
Female loggerheads, like other sea turtles that drag themselves from the surf to lay their eggs, normally choose quiet, remote beaches to give birth. Resort strips with bright lights and tourists hardly fit that bill.
But Wednesday morning, just after sunrise, a member of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge's ``turtle patrol'' saw flipper marks in the sand at 46th Street indicating that a mother loggerhead had come ashore.
Paul Charland, a biologist who searches area beaches for turtle nests, immediately sealed off the site with yellow police tape.
As a crowd of morning joggers and early rising beachgoers soon gathered, three other refuge staffers arrived. After digging gingerly through two feet of cool white sand, the team found the prize.
The discovery represents the farthest north and most bustling spot where refuge scientists have located a sea turtle nursery in Virginia Beach, said deputy refuge director Joe McCauley.
It also is the first turtle nest of any kind found along the Virginia coast during this unusually slow summer mating season, which ends next month.
``We're very excited around here,'' McCauley beamed. ``You just normally don't have sea turtles laying eggs in those areas.''
The team placed the eggs in an ice chest, covering them in sand and their mother's still-fresh secretions. The eggs will be shuttled to the refuge and re-buried in protected cages in serene beaches at the southern tip of Virginia Beach, said wildlife biologist John B. Gallegos.
In 60 to 66 days, Gallegos said, the eggs should hatch. The newborns will later be released at a ceremony just before sundown in which they will stumble toward the ocean and begin their perilous lives. Only one of 100 hatchlings survives predators and the elements to reach maturity, he said.
Most sea turtles migrating along the south Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico are protected by the federal government as endangered species. The loggerhead, however, is in slightly less trouble; it is classified as a threatened species, Gallegos said.
This year has not been easy on sea turtles. An unusually high number of dead sea turtles washed ashore this spring along the North Carolina coast, near Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge.
Virginia biologists said Wednesday that cool spring weather and the North Carolina die-off may be responsible for so few sea turtles nesting along the Virginia coastline, their northern migratory edge.
Last year, eight nests were active in Virginia Beach. Until Wednesday, biologists had not found even one.
Gallegos suggested that the mother loggerhead responsible for the 46th Street nest also tried to come ashore last week, near Fort Story. Last Thursday, while making his early-morning patrol rounds, Charland found flipper marks just south of the military base. But he discovered no eggs.
``It's very possible that she came ashore and got scared off, maybe by a light or a noise or something,'' Gallegos said. ``She might have swam offshore for a while and then decided to try again. And she landed here.''
The northern beaches at the Oceanfront have only been patrolled by refuge staff since 1992, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started funding sea turtle research as part of its beach replenishment program, McCauley said.
The corps gives the refuge about $12,500 a year to hire two part-time biologists in the summer mating season. Each morning, they ride on motorized beach cruisers from Fort Story to Croatan Beach, looking for scrape marks or other evidence of a turtle landing.
``I've been patrolling since July,'' Charland said. ``This is my biggest find - my only find, really. It's pretty exciting.'' ILLUSTRATION: BETH BERGMAN PHOTOS/The Virginian-Pilot
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service workers remove some of the 123
loggerhead sea turtle eggs from a nest in the sand at the Oceanfront
near 46th Street in Virginia Beach on Wednesday.
Morning joggers and early-rising beachgoers watched refuge staffers
dig through 2 feet of sand to find the eggs.
KEYWORDS: LOGGERHEAD TURTLE EGGS by CNB