Back to Florida

Back to Florida.  And why not?  Hayes here.  We postponed our trip back to 29 since Dad got a bit delayed.  Mom bought Reeder's homeschool stuff.  We packed up, and headed south for another couple weeks of paradise.

Rainy days provide fun on the Island.  At the nature center the were rabbit sitting for a few days.  Since we're good at babysitting we tried our hat at rabbits.  Voila.  Another talent for the Kappel kids.

OK.  This is the big stuff.  And there are already more pics to post.  But, we're going to work with what Weiler had uploaded as of last night.  I'll ask him to do more tomorrow.

Anyway, we found out that there is a little volunteer group on the island that excavates sea turtle nests 3 days after they hatch to count eggs and such.  So, we went out to see what we could find.

And would you believe if we told you it a retired Master Sergeant of the Marine Corps was leading our patrol?  Yep.  Good instructor, we believe.  So here we are, getting ready to dig up the nest.

That's Patty, she, of course, had the real job as Marine wife.  That's beside the point, and maybe my mom made me type that.  Moving forward, she's taking out all the eggs while the Marine talks to us (are you following who does all the work?).

Weiler was super interested.  And that cute little pile by his foot are the unhatched eggs.  Patty counts all the egg pieces and records how many went unhatched.  Both the nests we checked had about 100 eggs total.  Pretty amazing.

I'm helping count.  Give the thumbs up because it's GOOD that there were no live turtles in the nest.  That means all the hatchlings made it out.  Go turtles, go.

This was on our way to the next turtle nesting site.  An adventure always awaits us!

Bonus!  Horseshoe crab!

Kinda cool.  This is a dead sea turtle.  So it was neat to see the little fellow, too bad he didn't make it to the big swim.

More nests yet to hatch.  Another night, perhaps :)