We went up to Padre Island last night. The girls wanted to do the junior ranger badges up there since we were close, they now feel ownership here, and it was mainly about sea turtles.
Padre Island National Seashore is the largest undeveloped barrier island in the world. It has over 70 miles of seashore on the Gulf of Mexico.
There are 5 species of sea turtles that inhabit the island. They are all threatened or endangered.
The Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle is a species they are doing a lot to preserve. To the point that when turtles come on shore to nest, scientists dig up the eggs (to prevent poachers or animals from digging up and eating the eggs) They keep them in a box with sand, incubate them, and the day they hatch they bring all the baby turtles onto the beach for release into the ocean. Once they’re in the ocean they again collect the baby turtles and keep them for a year until they are older and re release them into the ocean. It’s a lot of
Unfortunately human causes, mainly pollution is the biggest detriment to turtles. They get caught up in old fishing lines and ingest more plastic then you’d like to know. Look at the similarity of a jellyfish to that of a drink top. It’s a problem.
Padre Island National Seashore is also a big stop for bird watchers. Half the bird species in North America use Padre Island via the Central Flyway. (remember the eagle sanctuary along the Mississippi River)
We learned that because of the way the wind and water currents are a lot of garbage gets washed up on shore. We went out to collect trash. We were surprised to not find as much trash as we were first expecting, especially after the amount was on South Padre Island, but it was so incredibly windy were convinced it all blew back into the ocean. Seriously it was so windy you could barely look up wind walked by back up the beach.
We drove to Houston. We plan to visit Nasa tomorrow. The girls and I watched Hidden Figures in preparation for tomorrow. We hadn’t seen it yet. I highly recommend it. We all loved it. Edwin found a place near Nasa to have some gulf food…crawdad boil. We ended up camping in the parking lot overnight.
No one enjoyed dinner…except Edwin…who loved it. The crawdads did serve well for entertainment and pranks. And we were in Rockets 🚀 Town do we were happy to be at a sports bar to watch the Houston Rockets do their thing.
