Sea turtles are incredible animals that inspire affection and curiosity across the world. Loggerhead turtles, the ones we see laying eggs on the South Carolina coast, can live up to 50 years and reach nearly 6 feet in length.
Even more amazingly — around the age of 15 to 20 years old, female loggerhead turtles return to the same general area they hatched to lay their own eggs and bury them in sand “nests.” These marine turtles’ ability to navigate comes from their sensitivity to the Earth’s magnetic fields, scientists say.
Loggerheads are a “keystone species,” meaning they are a vital part of their environments, including the coastal areas like ours where they lay their eggs each summer.
But these amazing creatures face significant threats, including pollution, climate change, being netted unintentionally in commercial fishing operations, loss and degradation of nesting habitats due to coastal development. Unsurprisingly, much of the endangerment each of the seven species of sea turtles face is mainly due to human intervention.
On Kiawah Island, a dedicated group of volunteers, The Kiawah Island Sea Turtle Patrol, is mitigating some of those threats in a measured manner. As the largest sea turtle patrol in the state, 300+ volunteers work May through October to protect, record and conserve the sea turtles’ annual egg-laying and subsequent hatching. Since 2017, Kiawah has been the densest nesting beach of South Carolina’s developed beaches.
It’s estimated about one in 1,000 marine turtle hatchlings make it to adulthood. And that’s the underlying impetus for the Kiawah Island volunteers — they want to give these magnificent turtles the best chances to make it.
A shared sense of responsibility
The town of Kiawah is unique in that there’s not one but three biologists on the city staff — a testament to the residents’ passion for conservation. People move to Kiawah from all over the country to enjoy the area’s beauty, so it’s only natural that many of them want to become involved in its protection.
Lead biologist Jim Jordan said the sea turtle patrol, which officially started in 1990, really began when locals started informally recording and caring for the nests in the early 1970s, a point when sea turtles were not yet a protected species. The group has grown every year and is now a popular way for folks, including part-time residents, to get involved in conservation efforts.
“We’re one of only a handful of beaches in the state that patrol by vehicles. Our crew patrols every morning, in a truck that typically has four volunteers on it — that’s our ‘nesting patrol,’ ” Jordan explained. “The bulk of our volunteers are in the ‘hatching patrol,’ where each group covers a one mile section of beach, they find and mark the nests, walk the beach every morning and check on all the nests in their zone.”
Nesting, hatching and helping
The Kiawah Island Sea Turtle Patrol allowed the Charleston City Paper in June to observe an early morning escapade, which started before dawn and included a drive down a rugged path to the beach. Longtime patroller Bill Thomae, who is also a volunteer firefighter, explained the process as he drove the sea patrol truck west down the beach, then turning around and driving more slowly east as the rising sun began to catch the turtles’ tracks in the sand.
Thomae pointed out the way to figure out the turtle’s direction from the ocean to the dunes, and the dunes to the ocean. She leaves scalloped marks in the tracks, using her fins to drag her heavy body ashore. The track towards the shore includes a long, deep line which is the marking of the turtle’s cloaca, from which the eggs come. The way back to the water doesn’t have this line, as long as it’s not a “false crawl” in which the mother sea turtle decides to turn around and go back into the water instead of laying her eggs in that particular spot.
Once a site is chosen, the turtle uses hind flippers to dig a vase-shaped hole about two feet deep. She then lays her eggs. Usually, it will take the sea turtle about 45 minutes to lay a nest with about 100 eggs before the sun has risen. From there, it takes 60 days until they hatch, during which time the sea turtle patrol checks the nests daily. On this particular morning, two nests had been disturbed by coyotes.
The volunteers, married couple Bill and Beth, who are in their 24th year of volunteering, and Carol Medendorp, who joined 12 years ago, dig up the nest, wearing gloves and using red buckets to collect the eggs.
Bill Thomae dug 24 inches into the sand, first using a hole digger and then his hands, to find and count 38 destroyed eggs, some of which were ravaged and strewn on the sand by the coyotes. There were 72 live eggs still inside the nest. Beth Thomae marked those numbers down.
Then, they collected the live eggs, each of which is about the size of a golf ball, and placed them carefully into the red bucket. A few feet away, The Thomaes dig a new, two-foot-deep hole, which is then marked by a short stake and covered with a wire fencing. The fencing has 2×4-inch openings for the hatchlings to come out of later in the summer. Out of each nest they survey, the volunteers collect one egg for DNA testing in collaboration with the University of Georgia.
The patrol van is stocked with tools. Earlier this year, Thomae and another volunteer cut more than 400 screens and 1,600 sticks to mark the sites, based on last year’s final count, 437 nests.
Beth Thomae records the locations of the nests, communicating with the hatching patrol on which turtle crawl tracks are new this morning and should be checked for nests. They’re checked one by one, zone by zone, until we reach the end of the beach. Her husband puts a long stick into the sand, searching for loose sand which indicates a nest. Some of the tracks are, in fact, false crawls, and a handful are actually new nests which the trio of volunteers recorded, marked and protected with wire fencing.
On this particular June morning, a sea turtle was not caught in the act of laying her eggs. But the promise of that experience is one of the most exciting parts of the entire process, said the volunteer leader and S.C. Department of Natural Resources (DNR) license holder, Lynn Sager.
‘Cool dudes and hot chicks’
Sager, who’s worked with the patrol since 2002, said the first time she saw a female turtle leaving her nest was a thrilling experience.
“She was headed back to the water after burying and camouflaging her nest. We got out of the truck and watched, and I mean, it was an absolute thrill. It’s not something you get to see every day.”
Sager explained how the patrol handles not only caring for the nests, but also helping to guide the hatchlings towards the water when it’s time for them to emerge. Once they break open their shells, the young turtles may take three to seven days to dig their way to the surface, helping to lift one another up. The eggs that are in the deeper and thus cooler sand will become males, and the warmer eggs will become females. (“Cool dudes and hot chicks,” Bill Thomae joked.)
Hatchlings usually wait until night to emerge from the nest. That’s when Sager and the volunteers will “line up and create a sort of runway for the hatchlings,” she said. “Part of our job is to scare off the birds, waving of hands and hollering.” And another part is making sure that residents follow the island’s light ordinance, as artificial light at night may lead turtles astray.
The young turtles follow the light of the moon into the ocean, and then, the few lucky survivors make their way to the coast of Africa. (Remember the scene in Finding Nemo where the sea turtles show Dory and Marlin how to catch a ride on the current?) Twenty or so years later, those females will ride the opposite way and return to the Palmetto State’s coast to lay their eggs.
Biologist Jordan emphasized the loggerhead population is rising in recent years, in part to the help of these patrol groups which exist all over the East Coast. It will take 15 to 20 years to see the results of this day’s work, though, and the DNA study with the University of Georgia, which got started 12 years ago, is revealing the data.
“We’ve seen annual nest numbers at a steady increase in the last 10 to 15 years,” Jordan said. “There are still threats, but having these nest protection programs throughout the coastline really helps us to keep tabs on this. We can relocate nests when necessary. We can try to mitigate damage or loss from predators. So we’re seeing the effects of the work that was done 15, 20 years ago in these rising numbers today.
“The recovery of sea turtle populations, at least with loggerheads, is a success story and likely will continue to be a success story.”
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