Mother turtles struggle heroically past power boats, relentlessly pursue access around bulkheads, cross roadways choked with teeming summer traffic, and are often forced to make several attempts to dig through gravel landscaping to lay eggs, driven to near exhaustion by the instinct to perpetuate the species. Months later, skunks with an uncanny ability to sniff out the egg deposits, feast efficiently on all the nearly mature baby turtles which are still in the egg hole. It is not just a travesty. It portends the end of a species. Time to rid these islands of the skunks before it's too late.