Them is Fightin' Words

In response to Michael's malicious comments regarding the definition of a true turtler (i.e. one who works with turtles in the water; afterall, any hairless ape can walk the beach in search of turtles). I disagree and feel that I can expand accurately because I have worked from the beach, water and air to study turtles.

All three platforms have their pros and cons and all can be very tedious. True, anyone can walk the beach in search of turtles, this is especially true in areas with very little tidal amplitude, basically the beach stays the same all the time with respect to the height of the tide. However, in areas where there is a large tidal amplitude, finding turtles can be difficult and sometimes dangerous.

On Wassaw we can have 100 yards of beach at low tide and then have water rushing into the woods at high tide. Try finding a turtle nesting at the base of a 100 foot tall pine tree, where there are no crawls to follow and only the sound of twigs snapping to locate the beast.

Occasionally, we have to plow through miles of thick, never been timbered, maritime forest to get from point A to point B until the tide receeds. We battle the tide and often swarms, no... clouds, of insects. Mosquitoes are nothing when you've had the opportunity to experience sand gnats, hence Savannah naming their minor league baseball team the 'Sand Gnats'. This hiking is done when temperatures are 80 degrees at midnight!

In some weeks we have logged over 90 miles of hiking in order to patrol a 6 mile stretch of beach, continuously, every night in order to observe as many turtles as possible. Now, here is where you seperate the turtlers from the tourists. Each season we see over 80% of the turtles that nest on Wassaw, sometimes as many as 99%. You can teach a hairless ape to walk the beach looking for turtles, but you can't teach them how to patrol those beaches with the efficiency to find over 3/4 of the turtles that nest there in a season.

My utmost respect to all of those TURTLERS that spend many night's battling the elements to find turtles on the BEACH!