Blooming Lillie: Kemp's Ridley

On a typical morning my day begins around 7:30 or 8:00, but today it began at exactly 4:47AM!

Why you ask?! Why wake up at 4:47 and not 4:45 or 5:00?

Well :47 gave me two minutes more than :45 and :50 is of course WAY too late. We needed to be out of the apartment and on our way to pick up C by no later than 5:10. We swung by C's house and made a quick pit stop at the coffee shop and we three were off to the shore by 5:33 (making much better time than any of us could have imagined). And the adventure began! After a couple of failed attempts we were finally on our way to see the sunrise baby sea turtle release at the National Seashore.

On account of it being a Saturday morning it was very busy! I hear that release that happen on weekday mornings are a lot less congested, but I really enjoyed the experience, none the less. The hatch and release program for the Kemp's Ridley turtles began at our National Seashore in 1986. The park rangers to us that the Kemp's Ridley turtle is one of the most endangered sea turtle species in the world and at one time there were less than 500 K.R. turtles in the world. I will put a few links to the websites with more information about the K.R. turtles and the hatch and release programs at the bottom of this post, but for now I want to share some of the photos we got today!

Here you can really see how many people were there to watch these tiny turtles embark into the wild.

The baby sea turtles are attracted towards the bright light of the sun and the white caps of the waves. The babies can even mistake a white shirt for the waves which is why the volunteers near the water are wearing white shirts. The park rangers even asked for people wearing white shirts to stand behind people so the turtles wouldn't be tempted to head the wrong direction. The K.R. turtle is apparently the smallest sea turtle topping out at about 100 pounds full grown; the baby turtles were so tiny and delicate that I can't even imagine them growing to be 10 pounds!

C's picture of the baby.

My picture of the baby.

***Let's take a quick second here to compare the photos from an iphone 5 (C's photo on the left) and the

Samsung Galaxy SIII (my photo on the right). What do you think?***

My love also took some really great photos, but because we were so far away and the turtles so tiny it was hard to get crisp photos. I know C even had trouble with her telephoto lens.