We saw the first Skink of spring this morning, crawling up between the planks of the back deck.  For the uninitiated, uninformed and just plain slow, a Skink (family Scincidae)  is a fat bluish lizard that looks like a short garter snake with feet.  Unlike the other prolific lizard residents here, particularly the green and brown Anole, and the Gecko, which are playfully appealing and fun to watch, the Skink is an altogether disturbing critter in looks and behavior.  They are furtive and way too pliable, owing, I guess, to the fact that they have no bones whatsoever, a primitive holdover that conjures deep feelings of malevolence and distrust.  I’m thinking maybe the snake in the Garden in Genesis was really a Skink. Sorry to be so hard on an innocent creature, but there you have it.  Not so sure about the innocence either.

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So here’s how an unfettered, slightly off-kilter mind can work.  Last night, about two a.m., one of the smoke alarms went off.  There were a couple of long beeps, not the chirping like when the battery is going.  Then it stopped.  I don’t know what triggered it, maybe some ozone floating by, or some methane released by the cat or one of the other residents here, but as I lay there waiting for another beep, which would make me have to get up and investigate, and with the crashing of the surf in the background, I started thinking about the technology of such signaling devices, which soon segued, probably because of the ocean, to a plan to rig a device to signal in the house when a sea turtle was coming ashore.  Stay with me here.  It’s not really that great a leap.  Turtle season is just around the corner, May 1, to be exact, and in 16 years here we’ve only witnessed two laying their eggs, both last summer.

The first was when my lovely niece was visiting from Oregon.  We had gone down to the beach at dusk with chairs and Champaign to enjoy the close of a wonderful day and saw a big mama making her way up the beach from the surf.  We sat as close as we could without distracting her and watched the whole process, the laborious digging of the hole, the laying of the more than a hundred eggs, her slow crawl back to the water, for more than two hours.  It was a once in a lifetime experience.  Two months later we were lucky enough to see those eggs hatch and the little turtles scramble for the ocean.

The other one came ashore early one morning, just before light, and lay a nest a few yards from the first.  It is very rare that they come ashore in daylight; she must have had a rough night getting in.  We got some pictures of that one.  Anyway, here’s the plan:  I want to rig some kind of motion sensor down on the beach that will set off an alarm in the house when a turtle comes ashore within a certain arc.  I’ve actually checked it out, and there are some available that just might work over the range we have to cover.  I know, I know, anything that goes by will also set it off, but the birds are few and far between at night, and a night heron I’d probably want to see anyway.  That leaves the occasional drunk, which, as I’ve related, remains an issue.  But I’ve thought that through, too.  I think I can kill two birds with one stone– clear the beach, and heal a drunk in one well-timed, stealthy attack.  Stay tuned.

Sea Turtle