NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The world’s smallest and most endangered sea turtles have hatched in Louisiana’s wilds for the first known time in more than 75 years, officials said Wednesday.
“Louisiana was largely written off as a nesting spot for sea turtles decades ago, but this determination demonstrates why barrier island restoration is so important,” Chip Kline, chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority, said in a news release.
Crews monitoring the Chandeleur Islands — a chain 50 miles east of New Orleans — to help design a restoration project found tracks of females going to and from nests and of hatchlings leaving a nest.
The first tracks were found by a crew surveying birds “before the sea turtle nesting season really kicked off,” said Matthew Weigel, coastal resources scientist manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
After that crew brought back a photo of a sea turtle “crawl,” the two agencies began weekly flights over the island to look for more. Weigel said he and Todd Baker of the restoration agency were walking between two that they’d sighted from the plane on July 29 when they stumbled on hatchling tracks on the beach.
“There was some high-fiving going on,” he said. They followed those tracks back to a nest they hadn’t known about. There, they found two tiny, newly emerged turtles, which they followed back to the beach.
Weigel said aerial surveys found 52 sets of tracks, some of which experts identified as Kemp’s ridley, others as loggerhead sea turtles. Some were “false crawls” where no nest was made.
