BRENT: Although New Year is good chance to slow down and receive a breather for lots of people, but spare a thought for Western Australian sea turtles.
Right now is the peak nesting season for the Loggerhead Sea Turtle and at Gnaraloo Station, one hundred and fifty kilometres north of Carnarvon, on ground monitoring and protection from feral animals is in full swing.
Gnaraloo Turtle Conservation program assistant Melissa Tan has been surveying the turtles since the first of November last year, she says a total of 151 turtle nests have been recorded at two beaches.
“The tracks are very obvious, you can actually spot a track from further down the beach they look like big tyre tracks then when you follow them up to the dune you can tell that the turtle has come though and she has dug a lot of sand up,” she says.
“The egg chamber will hold one hundred to one hundred and thirty eggs each clutch and after she has laid that clutch she covers it up with a whole lot of sand mounds to camouflage it really well.”
The turtles make the nests under the cover of darkness in a slow exhausting process that takes several hours.
“These mother turtles can be up to one hundred kilos heavy.
“When you see them swimming around in the water they look very graceful and they move really nicely and when they come up on the land they are quite slow and it takes them a while to get up the beach and it can take them hours to lay a nest,” Ms Tan says.
The conservation program is funded by the Gnaraloo Station with assistance from Rangelands NRM and Caring for Country. Since the program began in 2010 monitoring has successfully prevented feral predators from disturbing sea turtle nest at both Gnaraloo Bay and Cape Farquhar Rookeries.
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