Cape Cod National Seashore
Last weekend I went to the Cape to visit the seashore and hang out with friends. This is when I first got there and couldn't find anyone but I liked the random green things growing on the beach.
I walked up and down the beach, it was very low tide with lots of sandbars and long shallow pools. I crouched down to get a photo of a hermit crab but this little shrimp had other ideas!
Eventually I saw a group of 8 adults with no children, and knew it had to be my friends.
Out in the ocean there were big ol' spider crabs!
Click to view
And also some little ones.
And you know what else? A tiny turtle hatchling! It's embarrassing to admit this, since there were half a dozen zookeepers present, but none of us could identify this turtle at the time. I sent the image to social media and a few hours later found that it was a diamondback terrapin, a species found mainly in salt marshes.
There was kind of a lot of human traffic in the area where we found it, so we took it to deeper waters to swim away.
A few hours later the tide was back in and we could actually swim!
Time for swimming zookeeper selfies!
A pretty great way to spend part of the weekend of Summer Solstice.