Patrick, of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, carefully plucked the eggs from the foot-deep hole and placed them one by one in a cooler layered with moist sand from the nest, the first step in an unprecedented turtle egg evacuation to save thousands of threatened hatchlings in the oily Gulf of Mexico.

After about 90 minutes of parting the sand with her fingers, she placed 107 eggs in two coolers that were loaded onto a Fed-Ex temperature-controlled truck. They are being transported to a warehouse at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, where they will incubate and hatch before being released into the Atlantic Ocean.

Read the complete story at The Boston Globe.