Turtles in Action

A little follow up post to yesterday, baby sea turtles in action!

Something Truly Incredible

This Sunday I woke up before dawn to drive down to Palm Beach with my friends Chris and Brooke. What was our reason for getting up at this ungodly hour? To protect the local sea turtles.
It’s the time of year now when the eggs are starting to hatch and these little guys need all the help they can get to survive the long scuttle down to the sea. Brooke works for the local sea turtle conservation group and she’s out on the beach early in the morning every Sunday to gather data about the turtles. When she finds some new hatchlings like we did last weekend, she makes sure that they make it safely from the nest to the ocean.
For me, the experience was just incredible. Knowing I’ve helped an endangered species get a leg up in the world gave me a feeling that I’ve never had before, like what I was doing actually mattered on a scale larger than myself. I came to a realization that if you want to do something truly incredible, you’ve got to get up early in the morning, by which I mean that everything good happens outside of your comfort zone.

Your Friend the Sandhill Crane

One of the things that I love about living in Florida is all the wildlife we see out here, especially birds. We live in a rental house that backs up to a small lake and we get all kinds of water birds, my favorite is the Sandhill Crane. 

 

This photo was taken right behind our back porch! They are very brave around humans and you can see them sleeping next to cars in parking lots or walking right past you down the street. We’ve started feeding them, which I’m pretty sure might be against the law, but we saw our neighbor doing it one day so we did it too! Brian likes to throw them pieces of bread and crackers and one time he actually got one to eat out of his hand!

I love the way they move, and whenever I see them walking past our back door I try to take video of them to keep for reference in case I ever need to animate a large bird or a dinosaur. 

 

Living in Florida, Brian and I have become like amateur bird watchers. Our coolest sighting happened while we were driving down NE Indian River Drive when a bald eagle flew alongside our car with a still living (but not for long) fish in its talons. It was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!