“Today on CapeCast: A perfect confluence of bad storms and temperature changes means more endangered sea turtles washing up on Cape beaches. Watch compelling footage as volunteers and staffers from Mass. Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary tend to these cold creatures. Go inside the turtle emergency room at the Wellfleet Bay Audubon sanctuary and see what’s up with the recent spate of endangered turtle strandings!“
Turtle Journal Scours Dennis Beach before Sunset
From record high temperatures and pleasant warm breezes last week, Cape Cod snapped into winter mode this weekend. An Arctic front swept through New England and roared across the bay, creating enormous breakers by Sunday afternoon with a sustained 30-knot northerly wind blowing unobstructed on the long fetch from Downeast Maine to the northern shores of Dennis and Brewster. Sea turtles that had lingered too long in Cape Cod Bay were tossed ashore and spread along endless miles of wind-facing beaches. Staff and volunteers of Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary searched those beaches for several hours at every high tide, daylight and nighttime, to rescue tropical sea turtles before the frigid winds turned recoverable cold-stunning into irreversible freezing.
Juvenile Kemp’s Ridley Tossed Ashore in Freezing Conditions
During times like these, experienced rescuers have learned to put personal and professional lives on hold and to suspend important decisions until punch-drunk sleep deprivation can be relieved with a few hours of uninterrupted z’s. This posting attempts to convey the feel of around-the-clock turtle rescues, the unimagined bliss of finding and saving some of the rarest sea turtles in the world, the majestic beauty of raw nature and a bit of the comedic interlude that refreshes our sleep starved team as we pound out mile after mile after lonely mile of patrols.Â
While it comes late in this posting, the short video of the 3 AM rescue of a small Kemp’s ridley from Dennis on Monday morning (see below) may give you a visceral sense of the moment of discovery when out of the impenetrable darkness a ray of hope emerges. For each turtle saved, individuals scour tens of miles of windswept, wave eroded and wrack laden beaches during the worst imaginable weather conditions.
Powerful Winds, Plunging Temperature Drive Turtles Ashore
The engines that drive turtles ashore in Cape Cod each fall are winds, waves and tides … with an assist from dropping temperatures. Trapped in the bay as they migrate southward when cued by dropping ocean temperatures, juvenile Kemp’s ridleys, green sea turtles and loggerheads become snared in the jutting geography of Cape Cod’s giant arm. Sluggish in chilling waters, they enter cold-stunned stupor at about 50° F and become as helpless as any other piece of flotsam and jetsam in the sea. The physics of prevailing winds, wave actions and relentless tides drive turtles ashore on beaches in the opposing direction of the wind. Once they are tossed onto land, the life clock starts ticking because exposed to frigid ambient temperatures and blistering winds, these tropical animals will quickly lose whatever remains of their energy and life force. Unless recovered soon after stranding, they will not survive.
So, the dangerous beauty of a windstorm actually saves the lives of these sea turtles, giving us access to them before hypothermia becomes irreversible. The sooner in the season they strand, the higher the probability of survival. The longer they are exposed to the cold elements of a harsh Cape Cod fall, the smaller the odds of recovery.
Cold-Stunned Kemp’s Ridley at Mayflower Beach
The pace of strandings this weekend has hit a record tempo as we surpass 100 cold-stunned sea turtles for the season. With gale force winds pounding the Cape, turtles came ashore on every tide, like this Kemp’s ridley tosssed upside down by the morning tide in Dennis on Sunday.
Recoverying Kemp’s Ridley from Mayflower Beach
The video clip above documents the recovery of a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle found by a beachwalker at Mayflower in Dennis on Sunday. The proper rescue procedure is to move the animal above the high water line so that it doesn’t get swept back out to sea, to cover the turtle with dry seaweed to prevent additional hypothermia from exposure, and to call the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary at 508-349-2615 to report the location of the find. Trained rescuers respond to the site and recover the animal for evaluation, triage and follow-on treatment.
Entertaining Intermission with Shorebird Ballet
Walking miles of beach in sleep-starved giddiness, you often encounter natural diversions to keep your mind and eyes sharp and fixed on the mission. As Turtle Journal walked the Chapin Beach leg of Dennis on Sunday afternoon, a ballet troupe of shorebirds offered an entertaining interlude with a setting sun as dramatic backdrop.
Gripping 3 AM Rescue of Endangered Kemp’s Ridley
With a dozen turtles arriving with each tide, the call was inevitable. “On the beaches for the 2:50 AM high tide Sunday night/Monday morning.“  One advantage to a middle of the night sea patrol is the lack of competing traffic. Heck, not a single solitary human being was out and about as we drove through 6A in Dennis and along the backroads to the beach. Turtle Journal drew the western edge of the search from Chapin Beach to Sea Street Beach in Dennis.
The weather had worsened … considerably. Temperatures dipped below freezing. Storm puddles behind the dunes sported razor thin ice sheets. Winds still whistled from the northwest and angled breakers across the shallow tidal flats onto the beach. Any turtle stranded on this tide, on this night, would die before dawn unless rescued soon after beaching.
As I zigzagged through the drift fencing at Mayflower Beach and scaled the wind-blown dunes to reach the shore, gusts still riled the bay and waves rumbled from left to right, west to east, sweeping seaweed and debris into piles along a dotted line called the wrack. That’s the spot we find most sea turtles, mixed among flotsam and jetsam expelled by an angry sea.
Endangered Kemp’s Ridley Stranded in Surf Zone
But this little Kemp’s ridley, measuring 25.7 centimeters (~ 10 inches) maximum straight-line carapace length, didn’t reach the wrack line. It lay in the intertidal surf at the edge of the receding bay. Even in the dark shadows of my headlamp, I could see the pinkish “pooling” of the skin around the ridley’s plastron (bottom side), indicating that its circulation had slowed to a crawl. Yet, there were hopeful signs in the wet beach sand where it had just been deposited. Indentations formed where the turtle may have swept its flippers back and forth in a swimming motion.
A finger touch behind the head caused a neck muscle contraction. The eyelid twittered to a gentle stroke. When lifted for the trip back to the rescue vehicle, the ridley began to wave its flippers enough to be considerd a lively specimen on a night of freezing beach temperatures.
Atlantic Saury (Scomberesox saurus)
Not only sea turtles become beached on nights like this. An Atlantic saury (see picture above) had also been tossed into the wrack.
EXTRA! EXTRA!!
Kemp’s Ridley Recovered from Woods Hole in Buzzards Bay!
Sue Wieber Nourse Recovers Kemp’s Ridley from Gansett Beach, Woods Hole
The overwhelming percentage (99.9%) of cold-stunned sea turtles are found on beaches abutting Cape Cod Bay. Truth be told, the vast majority come ashore from Barnstable in the west to Truro in the north. A few strand in Provincetown, fewer still in Sandwich, and isolated turtles along the west shore of Cape Cod Bay up to Hull and Quincy. You can imagine the surprise to receive a call from a Buzzards Bay beachwalker, relayed through MBL, that a possible green sea turtle had been found on private Gansett Beach in Woods Hole.
The Turtle Journal team took the call and drove to Woods Hole for the snipe hunt. After a few false starts, we found the beach and a cold-stunned Kemp’s ridley sea turtle at the edge of the wrack line. Sue Wieber Nourse showed this rare turtle to a young woman named Ursula (and her grandmother Ellie Armstrong) whom we encountered as we searched for the turtle.
Yes, this turtle strands with lots of questions for researchers, not the least of which might be how the heck did it get here. Did it get trapped in Cape Cod Bay and find its way through the canal into Buzzards Bay? Did it actually get trapped north of Martha’s Vineyard, succumb to cold-stunned stupor and then get beached in this weekend’s blow?
Who Us Worry?
Any sensible rescuer would be a bit worried by the number and the tempo of the sea turtle strandings this fall. Yet, what worries Turtle Journal most is that the 100+ turtles we have recovered to date are predominately smaller ridleys. These stranding seasons have a regular, repeatable pattern and rhythm; small first, medium next and large last. We’re still at the “small first” stage and already more than 100 turtles!Â
Yikes, we hope no one has plans for the forthcoming holidays. Beaches to walk, turtles to save! What better present to unwrap than a seaweed encased tropical sea turtle on a snow and ice covered Cape Cod beach in the midst of an ocean effect blizzard. Can it possibly get any better than saving the world one cold-stunned sea turtle at a time?
Weather and winds have been crazy and fickle this fall. Earlier this week temperatures soared into the 60°s and winds have blown around the compass, scattering wrack, flotsam, jetsam and sea turtles from Provincetown to Yarmouthport. Last night weather struck again with a northerly gale and sporatic snow showers, pushing flood tides over seaside roadways. Turtle Journal received a wake-up call at our 24/7 hotline (508-274-5108) from a beachwalker in Dennis to report two Kemp’s ridley sea turtles at Howes Beach.
December Sea Turtle Patrol on Bayside Truro Beaches
If you have a few minutes, join the Turtle Journal team on a virtual daylight patrol from Ryder Beach to Fisher Beach on the bayside of Truro on the Outer Cape. Why Truro? Because southwest and west-southwest breezes blow turtles trapped in Cape Cod onto the shores of Truro and Provincetown.
Cold-Stunned Toad at Bound Brook in North Wellfleet
The fickle fall weather of Cape Cod tricks not only sea turtles, but many other northern critters … including the two legged variety. As the Turtle Journal team crossed the dunes at Bound Brook in North Wellfleet, we discovered a cold-stunned toad that had been seduced out of its hibernaculum by too warm conditions on Thursday and had succumbed to plunging temperatures Thursday night. Regular readers may recall a similar incident at the EXACT SAME SPOT that occurred in mid-November 2008 (see Leapfrogging Sea Turtle Patrol Yields Surprise). As noted in earlier postings, this year’s season has been delayed several weeks by bizarre weather conditions. We provided the specimen to the National Park Service at the Cape Cod National Seashore for more detailed study. We’ll let Turtle Journal readers know what scientists at the NPS discover.
Taylor the Turtle Dog Samples First Seasonal Snowfall
