Day 4 in Australia

We stayed in Agnes Water another night to rest after our long day. In the morning we headed to the beach so Matthew could finally try out the boomerang he got on the first day. The picture above is a beach in Agnes Water. It was stitched together with Autostitch.

A large empty beach is a good place to learn how to throw a boomerang.

We left Agnes Water and drove back to Bundaberg. The information booth there was quite helpful and we managed to work out a place to stay in Bargara, just east of Bundaberg. We also booked a trip to the Mon Repos Turtle Rookery that night. At Mon Repos, the Queensland Parks & Wildlife Service operate a ticketed beach access at night to watch nesting turtles and their hatchlings. The turtles nest from November to February and the hatchlings hatch from January to March. Everyone shows up at about 7:00pm and is put in groups of 70 people. Individual groups are taken to the beach when there is something to see to keep the disturbance to a minimum. They have volunteers posted on the beach looking for activity. We went with the third group, but that wasn't until after 11:00.

Once we got to the beach they gathered us all around a nest that had hatched. Most of the turtles had already made it to the sea, but they found a few stragglers in the grass headed for the moon and gather them up in the mesh pen. When a nest is found they dig up the contents to determine when the nest was layed, how many eggs hatched, how many didn't hatch, etc. In the picture above you can see the penned turtles and one of the staff/researchers digging up the nest counting egg shells.

A couple of baby turtles were brought around to get a closer look.

As we were making a path for the remaining turtles to go to the sea we got called over to another nest that was just hatching. It was very cool to watch 100+ turtles emerge from the sand.

Once the turtles were out they started digging up the nest to count eggs and found a few more cought in the grass.

The tunnel of light - When it was time to let the baby turtles make their way down the beach they lined everyone up on two sides of a wide path to guide the turtles down with lights. They don't really need guiding as they naturally go to the brightest part of the sky, which is usually the ocean, but using flashlights helps us see them. Some of us also made a "Tunnel of Light" down the middle of the path where we spead our legs and shine the flashlight in front of us. Most of the turtles then followed the line of flashlights down to the water between our feet - very cool.