Good News and Bad — 9 November 2000Hatchling 90, found blindly crawling down a dirt road on Lieutenant Island, is gradually become more active as she warms up. Still not as active as a normal, healthy September hatchling, she began to move her eyes beneath closed lids this morning. As she sun-bathed and swam in the warm wet tank today, she opened first her right eye and then her left one.
While she doesn’t keep them open all the time,
Terrapin 7 (shown below), a very mature female last seen swimming in Chipman’s Cove on 15 July 1999. She was found dead today in the salt marsh wrack of Duck Creek behind the Mobil Station on Route 6. In July she weighed 910 grams, measured 17.2 centimeters carapace length, and sported a very distinctive vee notch in her 7 marginal. In 1985 she was spotted making a nesting on Lieutenant Island opposite Indian Neck’s Field Point.
Her desiccated remains were discovered far back in the Duck Creek marshes, which feeds into the northeast corner of Chipman’s Cove. All soft tissue had decomposed leaving only bones and a very dry shell.
On the bright side, the mutts and I stumbled onto a newly hatched nest on Lieutenant Island. It was located on a small, sandy plateau between the high tide wrack and the bearberry hill behind the Landau cottage. Most of the shells were on the surface near a slit in the ground. Excavating this nest, which abutted Nest 81 laid by Terrapin 1028 on 10 July and hatched on 25 September, I found one non-viable egg, two hatchlings predated in their shells, and a few more shards from hatched and emerged turtles. A total of 13 terrapins hatched from this nest. The dogs and I had last patrolled this area in late October.
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