On Mother's Day, it's only appropriate to write about motherly labors of love. Few mothers go to the extremes that mama loggerhead turtles do. After decades at sea, these hard-shelled ladies mate, and then swim to the same coast on which they hatched to lay their own clutches of eggs on the upper beach. Getting to the dunes above the high tide line is hard work for these ponderous reptiles; they painfully thrust themselves forward up the shore with their flippers. Then, after selecting a suitable site for a nest, the turtle turns around and slowly excavates a deep hole, using her back flippers as sand scoops. She lays 100 or more round white eggs, covers them over and scatters sand around to conceal the nest. Only then can she make her retreat to the sea. In a couple of months, the baby loggerheads will hatch out of the nest and scramble down to the surf as fast as their little flippers can move them. (For more information, see the chapter on loggerheads in the book).
The photo above is of the tracks made by a female loggerhead turtle in June on a beach on Sanibel Island, Florida by Jean-Lou Justine. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Undeveloped beaches on Georgia sea islands are prime locations for loggerhead nests. A consortium of Georgia DNR and volunteer workers is dedicated to monitoring and protecting loggerhead nests along the coast, as well as tracking the mother turtles after they return to the ocean.
Georgia Oudoors has a great video about nesting loggerheads on Ossabaw island, watch it online at: