Summer of ’11
August 23rd, 2011
In memory of Jose (1942-2011)
Moving on
Although I find this difficult, I am finally able to come back to Turtle Trax and try to move things along.
Prior to losing perhaps the best friend I will ever have, I was already finding it hard to make changes here. I’d look at the site and feel overwhelmed, there is so much that needs to be done. The feeling hasn’t left, but so much has happened that I absolutely must do something here. I know many people arrive looking for information and current material, but it’s not easy to find here now. I do intend to fix this, but I have no idea when. As another dear friend commented recently, you pick something you can get done and do that, then repeat. Seems obvious, but so hard to do sometimes. At any rate, one thing I can do is post some of the recent good things that have happened.
5690 provides joy and thrills
This honu is known by many names to others but by her original tag number 5690 to us. The Maui News refers to her as Maui Girl, and their story Maui Girl returns (July 26, 2011) describes how she is back nesting again this summer after skipping a year.
Although we weren’t on Maui during her normal nesting time last year, we don’t think she waited until we showed up. As we’ve described here a few times, there is less and less of the algae that honu feed everywhere we’ve looked along the West Maui coast, and our theory is that she simply took longer to build up the energy reserves that she needs to lay eggs. We know she doesn’t make the 800 kilometer migration to nest, but she’s the result of millions of years of evolution, and her body has evolved to prepare her for that trip.
Her first reported nest was made the night of July 9. Although we were already on Maui by then, we hadn’t been watching for her because she normally begins nesting in mid-May, and no one had reported any nests yet. We therefore only learned of this nest after the fact. Since we now had a reference date, however, we were expecting her back in two weeks, and as the newspaper story reports, she did indeed make what we thought was her second nest on the night of July 23.
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5690 as she drops eggs on the night of July 23. This photo was taken while she was in her egg-laying trance, during which almost nothing can deter her from finishing. Prior to entering this state, she can easily be disturbed by lights and activity, causing her to abandon the effort and return to the sea.
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Alert readers will note that I wrote “reported” nest in that description above. The reason for that is a story that gives me a lot of personal pleasure and satisfaction.
5690 made another nest two weeks after the first, on the night of August 13, so we were expecting her to nest again on the night of August 20th. This is consistent with honu females, who usually make their nests spaced roughly two weeks apart. In the past, 5690 has been fairly reliable in her intervals, but has usually made seven nests instead of the normal four or five. She typically lays fewer eggs per nest, so her total production in a given year is about average.
Honu aren’t predictable, however, and we certainly don’t depend on 5690 to keep to a rigid schedule. Her pattern has been to make a few false crawls on the night before she nests, so we always go to the beach on her 13th day, just in case she decides to nest early. Sure enough, on the night of the 19th she made a few false crawls, but we judged from her behaviour that she wasn’t quite ready and wouldn’t nest until the next evening. We gave up our watch at 1:00 AM and went home.
On the off chance that she had come back after we left, I went to the beach the following morning to look for tracks. I was completely caught off guard when I chanced upon what looked to me like an old nesting attempt. It was in a patch of beach morning glory and not obvious, which is probably why it went unnoticed. It also didn’t look big enough to be a completed nest. Since it was covered in old debris, I knew immediately that it hadn’t been made the previous night, but I was startled when I looked closer and saw a hatchling! Sadly, the little fellow had already died, but I now knew I wasn’t looking at an abandoned attempt, but a completed nest.
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The previously unknown nest as it appeared when I found it. The unfortunate little hatchling is circled in red.
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While the hatchling’s fate was lamentable in one way, in another it was most fortunate. Knowing that this was a nest that had already started to hatch, I contacted Glynnis Nakai of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, who excavates turtle nests as part of her job. Three days after hatchlings have emerged, Glynnis excavates to determine how many eggs there were, how many actually hatched, and most important of all, to find and free any trapped hatchlings.
In this case, Glynnis responded immediately to my call, and at 5:00 PM Saturday evening I met her and Joanni Morris at the nest to help her excavate. After digging for a few minutes, we were delighted when she came upon two more hatchlings. One had died, but the other began wriggling at her touch and was clearly alive. I can’t describe how happy I was at that point, but as she dug a little further I grew ecstatic. The reason was that she found more live hatchlings. They had gotten wedged beneath some rocks and a root, and without our help, would never have reached the surface. By the time the nest was completely excavated, Glynnis had rescued 17 hatchlings. Including the little one whose sacrifice had saved the others, there were only three dead. What could have been an undiscovered tragedy turned into a brilliant rescue!
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The 17 rescued hatchlings, waiting in a bucket for their release. If their sibling hadn't died on top of the nest, these adorable little honu would have died underneath the sand.
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A little later, just at sunset, a small crowd gathered round to watch the little honu scramble down the beach to the ocean.
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Glynnis Nakai, US Fish & Wildlife Services, places some of the rescued hatchlings on the sand. Since biologists don't yet understand how hatchlings imprint their beach of origin, it's normal procedure to let them reach the water on their own.
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One of the rescued hatchlings reaching the water's edge. If this is a female and she survives, one day she'll return to this beach to make her own nests.
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Counting backwards and assuming 5690 was keeping to her usual schedule, this nest was made on or near June 25th. That’s still a pretty late start for her, over a month past the time she has begun in other seasons. For years she has nested only on the stretch of beach at Kamehameha Iki Park, but she has made nests in other places in Lahaina in the past. The question now is whether she nested somewhere else earlier in the summer. We’ve looked but not seen evidence of that, and by now any early nests have hatched. She’s never nested after the end of August. We don’t even know if she’ll nest on September 3, which is the next date that matches her pattern. That would be Nest 6, which is not unusual for her—in fact it’s normal—but if she really started so late, this is not a typical summer.
If she does come back, that would support the idea that the nest I discovered was her first or at most, second. If she doesn’t, there could have been two previous unknown nests, which would push her first date back to a more typical May 28th. Of course, if she doesn’t come back that won’t prove anything, but if she does we can be fairly sure there was at most one unknown nest—and if she comes back twice, which I think highly unlikely, we’ll be almost certain all of her nests are known.
But that’s not all…
Watching an excavation and hatchling release is always enjoyable, but recall that I had found this nest because I was checking to make sure 5690 hadn’t fooled us and nested after we went home the previous night. It turns out that she had not, and so our 5690 evening had actually just begun.
Our great friend and benefactor of the honu, George Balazs, had flown over from Oahu specifically to see 5690. For those unaware of the story, George has been leading marine turtle research in the Central Pacific for the US National Marine Fisheries Service since, well, almost forever. Back in 1981, George released a small yearling honu off the Big Island, with the single external tag bearing the number 5690. 19 years later, in 2000, he got a call from Maui that a turtle had nested on a Lahaina beach, and she had a tag: 5690! Since then, he’s naturally felt a special connection to this honu, and he’s taken a lot of pleasure from our reports of watching her make nests over the years. His job and location don’t allow him to be there on most of these occasions, but this year he decided to spend his own time and money to come over and see her again.
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(L to R) Glynnis Nakai, George Balazs, and Joanni Morris after the excavation of 5690's first known 2011 nest. The bucket at their feet holds 17 rescued hatchlings.
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You can imagine George’s delight to have lucked into an excavation that saved so many of her hatchlings. This meant that he (and we) had the extraordinary experience of seeing the mother honu and her progeny all in a single evening. While this was an exhausting night—none of us are getting younger—it was more than worth it. It did, however, take some patience. 5690 was not beyond providing us with a little suspense.
When we’ve been looking for her on other nights this summer, 5690 has been fairly consistent in making her first appearance about an hour and a half after sunset, around 8:30 PM. On this night, the one-shot chance that George had taken looked at first as though it wouldn’t pay off. Although he would have been happy with the unexpected hatchlings, it would have been a big disappointment if 5690 just didn’t show up. By 10:30 we were getting pretty anxious, although we weren’t about to quit waiting. Then, at 10:35, I saw her head pop up close to shore. She wasn’t about to let George down after all.
I alerted George and Ursula that she was about to crawl up the beach, and we’d just managed to settle down to watch when she slowly emerged from the water. The moon hadn’t risen yet and it was hard to see what she was doing, but eventually we could tell that she was making her way up the beach.
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5690 makes her first crawl of the night at 10:35 PM, August 20, 2011. (15 second exposure at ISO 3200)
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It took her 35 minutes for this first crawl, and although she eventually went back into the water, we were relieved just to know she was out there. Usually, it would be 30-45 minutes before she crawled out again, but continuing with breaking her pattern she showed up about 10 minutes later at the other end of the beach. Now, sea turtles are supposedly shy of bright lights when they come ashore to nest, but 5690 appears not to have read the manual. She crawled out right in front of two glaring floodlights on poles, behind which there was a loud nightclub complete with more flashing lights.
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This is the unlikely beach that 5690 emerged onto to make her nest. The two prominent floodlights and the flashing lights from the nightclub in the background (not to mention the constant low frequency drumbeat) should have deterred her—but didn't. (Photo courtesy George Balazs)
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As she moved up the beach, her behaviour became more typical of a nesting turtle, in that she veered towards the darkness provided by the shade of the vegetation. She crawled—and she crawled—and she crawled. Then she crawled some more. Once she was past the high-water line, she began moving parallel to the shore. She moved right over a lot of sand that I felt would have made a terrific nest. In fact, she actually had nested in that sand in a previous summer but not this time. About 100 meters later, she finally made it to the same patch of beach morning glory in which I’d discovered the nest that morning, and began to dig.
Sometimes 5690 digs for a while and then changes her mind and moves elsewhere. Not this night. Most other nests are made with just me and Ursula watching, if anyone. Again, not this night. At times there were a dozen or more observers, and at least six people (including us) watched her from start to finish, more than four and half hours. As always, I felt privileged and exhilarated to witness the process, and I’m pretty sure everyone felt much the same way. I’ve no doubt, however, that George got a special thrill that no one else could experience as he watched the same honu that he’d released in 1981 making her nest on a Maui beach 30 years later.
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George spent a good part of the night just lying and watching 5690 as she made her nest. His 30 year connection with her made it particularly special to him. (15 second exposure at ISO 1600)
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Links to other 5690 stories
I’ve never created a page devoted specifically to 5690. Perhaps I should, but until I do I’m providing some links to some of the other places where we’ve written about her.
- Honu Highlight—Notes on the birthing process (2002)
- 5690 hatchlings (2002)
- 5690 nests again (2002)
- 5690: Found! (2003)
- Excavating nest 1 (2004)
- 5690 does it to us—again! (2004)
- One nest excavated, another one made (2004)
- The most extraordinary 5690 sighting (2004)
- The 26 hour day (2004)
- Nest emergence (2004)
- Nest 5 hatches! (2004)
- 5690 makes nest #4 (2006)
- 5690 nests again: an experience re-born (2008)
- 5690 makes nest #6 (2008)
- Hatchlings! (2008)
- The “homeless” Mississauga Muse attracts the attention of Maui Police (2008)
Masha Kai
Masha Kai is a female honu, resident at Honokowai, who had a satellite transmitter attached in the summer of 2009. Unfortunately, her transmitter failed sooner than we’d hoped and the tracking maps we did get showed that