Only if you volunteer with the Turtle Patrol.
The money goes almost completly into your nest alone. It pays for the stakes and ribbon to tie off the nest, for the label and sign that tell people who adopted the nest and has info on turtles, for latex gloves, for the ATVs the patrol uses and gas.
The Turtle Patrol gives you an indication of what species it is, and a timeframe of when they should hatch. You are allowed to watch over the nest whenever you feel you want to. So they'll give you a 3-4 day time frame of when it should hatch, you can go there each night and wait if you wish, but its not required. If you are home when the nest hatches and the turtle patrol comes onto it, they will call you, at all hours of the night if you indicate and tell you its hatching, so if you can/want to go down, you could. 3 days after the nest started to hatch, they turtle patrol sets up a time for you to come down, to do the clean-up. That is what we did. At 6:30, we went down to dig up the nest. This is to count how many eggs hatched, how many didn't, how many babies died, what they died from (if they can tell just by looking at them), and save any strugglers who haven't been able to dig out yet. Almost always, the clean-up ends up with some live baby turtles. I believe they can survive 4 days underground. The local beaches unfortunartly are being ransacked by fire ants. If some of you don't know what they are, they are one of the meanest ants you'll meet and have actually caused the death of both children and elderly here. Most ant hills, you stomp on it, they run like crazy, scared...Not fire ants, just gently blow onto the nest and the carbon dioxide sets them off. Step on it and they swarm out of the nest and bite and sting. As their name says, their bites and stings feel like a burn. They came to Florida by accident in the 1970s I believe. So they really don't belong here. They just take over whereever they please. They really suck.
