Some rehabilitation and a new "spot" 20180527 Clarence and Paul do some site work and visit a new site

Sunday morning and Clarence and I are in the truck to so some site inspections and explore an area we wanted to checkout last fall. Our First spot was in one of our Windsor locations where the snappers had terrific success last fall. We had our rakes and a shovel with us and needed them both. This first "rehab" just needed some raking and smoothing before the nesting season.

The next spot started s quite a indentation in the hillside that these snappers use. Here is a shot after we loaded the first several shovels full of material.

It is tough to get the proper perspective on some of these images. The "hole" was about 10 inches (25cms) deep. We raked to recover some of the local gravel that had washed into the pond.

As there was not a lot of sand mixed in with this "washed" material, we had to find a little local mud to add to the the layers of gravel we tossed in. 

 Once we finished, with a little sunshine to dry out the damp material, you wouldn't even know we were there.

Even where we recovered the gravel, you would scarcely see any impact of what we did.

We then headed into our targeted investigation area, and we were very pleasantly surprised by what we found! We met some of the local cottage owners and they were very aware and knowledgeable about the local snappers. The were quite gracious and encouraging in letting us walk our area of interest. Now for the "good news/bad news": we found a high concentration of activity with 27 predated nests from last year. There may have been even more, those were just the nests we could count due to the presence of egg shells. We were also told of a nest that was located in the yard of one of the Cottager's.
We would like to thank Myrtle, Donna, Carl, and Steve for their time and willingness to work with us on the Turtle Patrol!
On the way home we stopped in at two areas where we had single nest success stories last fall and did some raking and shoveling to encourage snappers to lay there again this year.
So three sites visited and rehabbed, and new hot spot to keep an eye on this fall, a really successful day.
We are always looking for volunteers to help with work of this nature, so drop us a line and see if you can help out!

Yours in turtling,
Turbo