Bog Blog 5/18/11

Well, this rain is wreaking havoc with my weather wizardry! I haven't seen any nesting snappers yet, and haven't heard of any so far in the watershed this year. However, all is not lost—there are a couple of things we can figure out at this point.

Let's start with what we know:
1. Snappers are fat and lazy and wait for a very high tide during which they leave the creek, so they don't have to climb up the bank.
2. They need to lay their eggs in a nest that will remain above the high water mark for the summer.
3. Keeping in line with the notion of not letting the eggs be submerged, they won't lay eggs when the nest could fill with water from exceedingly heavy downpours.
4. Snapping turtle eggs need to incubate in the nest for 90 reasonably warm days, and usually hatch in early September to allow the hatchlings about a month to fatten up before they go into hibernation.

So, let's see what we can deduce! If it was going to be a cooler than usual summer, the turtles would have laid their eggs in April, to allow them to incubate long enough. Therefore, we can assume that if the turtles lay eggs now, temps will be average for the season. If they hold off until the new moon, or the full moon in June, we'll most likely be in for a hotter than usual summer.

Now intermingle that info with what we'll know about the wet/dry conditions for the season (gleaned from watching how far from the creek the turtles dig their nests). At the very least, we should be able to pick out the proper spf # on our sun block & decide how fast we need to get the swimming pool up & running. What I'm hoping for is that the turtles will come through, and we'll be able to best the on-air meteorologists once again!