After a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and bacon at our campsite, we headed to the Padre Island National Seashore visitor's center, just down the road. We picked up Junior Ranger packets and embarked on a beach walk with Ranger Buzz, who showed us how to scoop into the sand under the water and sift through it to find shrimp and other sea critters. We kept the creatures alive in a little oxygenated tub until we released them back into the gulf. (At which point a squadron of gulls swooped down to freeload off our efforts, to the kids' dismay.)
There's a species of sea turtle called Kemp's ridley that has been brought back from the brink of extinction over the last few decades. Most of Texas's Kemp's ridley nests are on Padre Island. Nesting season is from April through July. Park visitors are instructed to watch out for turtles coming up the beach and crossing the road to dig nests and lay their eggs. We are supposed to notify park rangers if we see one, so that they can mark the nest. The mother lays the eggs -- usually around 100 -- and then abandons them to return to the gulf. To give the eggs a better chance of hatching and to give the baby turtles a better shot at survival, the rangers collect the eggs and keep them in special incubators until they hatch.
So right now, the island is in a tizzy, because one of the clutches of eggs is due to hatch this week. Within 24 hours of the hatching, the park staff will release the babies back into the ocean; the public is invited to witness the event. The adult Kemp's ridley has a shell that's about two feet in diameter, but the babies are tiny -- smaller than the palm of your hand -- and, as one ranger said, when they're released, it looks like a bunch of Oreo cookies heading to the water. There's a telephone hotline with updated info on the status of the eggs, and a screen in the visitor's center keeps us apprised, too. A few days ago on Facebook, the rangers were reporting that the eggs would hatch early this week, possibly during our stay here. But as of late, they've pushed the date back, so it looks like we will miss the special occasion. Too bad; that would have been beautiful luck to get to see that.
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| We did NOT get to see this. The photo is from nationalgeographic.com. |
We spent the rest of the day on the beach, building sand castles and playing in the surf. When we checked in to the campground yesterday, a ranger warned us that two people had been stung by stingrays that day. We vowed to stay out of the water. But the gulf is so warm -- like a bath -- and waves are so inviting, that today we couldn't resist. We've taken to performing the "stingray shuffle" as we wade in the water -- dragging our feet so that we don't step directly on top of any stingray that may be lurking beneath the surface.
We grilled hot dogs for dinner. The campground has emptied out considerably since last night. Since there's no one else around, the gulls have been stalking us with eerie, Hitchcock-like doggedness. In fact, Keith stepped away from the grill for a moment, and a gull swooped in and snatched an entire frank right off the coals. His bounty, of course, attracted a legion of gulls who swarmed around us and waited for crumbs to blow off our dinner plates. Our meal became a full-contact event as we fed ourselves with one hand and used every other part of our bodies to shield our food from the wind and the gulls.
I worry about the tent still. It's held up for the last 24 hours -- and it held up on Assateague, with a broken pole, no less -- but it looks so pathetic, sagging and dropping in the wind. I hope we can all get some sleep.
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| It's hard to show the wind in a photograph. But in calm conditions, the tent is perfectly square and symmetrical. |
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