We found another 7 nests this morning, bringing our turtle to 54 nests and 31 false crawls. We are excited to share that on Tuesday morning we found suspicious tracks that look like a Green sea turtle crawled onto our beach! Unfortunately she did not lay but we are hopeful that she will return. 

Loggerheads move with an alternating flipper pattern whereas Greens move with a parallel movement with both flippers at the same time. See the pictures below to see the difference!

The turtles are here and off to a running start! We are at 31 nests on the state park beach. I checked seaturtle.org to see how we compare to previous years, on this date (5/17) and this is what I found:

2018 - 3
2017 - 18
2016 - 5 (our record year of 240 nests)

It is so exciting to be so busy already! We are excited to also have our two summer interns here to help out our turtle patrol. Stay tuned for their introductory blog post! They are doing so well and are catching on quickly to the patrol duties. Pictured below are our two interns, Cadey and Chloe, finding the eggs of two nests from turtles that nested so close to one another.

​Stay tuned for more turtle updates!

We found 2 nests yesterday and another nest this morning! We are so excited that the turtles are back and keeping us busy. This morning on patrol we had to relocate the nest as it was situated below the spring high tide line. The nest had 124 eggs. The tracks and the eggs were quite a bit smaller, so perhaps she is a new nesting sea turtle. We will find out when the genetics information returns later in the season.

​See below for some photos from the past two mornings.

We are so excited to share that the first nest on the Edisto Beach State Park has been found! This is such an exciting time of the year! See below for more photos from the morning. Miss Murtle also joined us on patrol today. We look forward to finding many more turtle nests! 

We are excited to announce that our annual Turtle Fest event will be held on June 1st this year from 10am - 12pm. This is a time to celebrate the return of our loggerhead sea turtles through fun educational activities, crafts and face painting. We will also have a raffle with prizes for those who participated in the activities and helped with a trash pick up. We hope to see you there!

​It is officially turtle season! We are all so excited at the Edisto Beach State Park to welcome back our nesting loggerhead sea turtles. We actually began the season early this year as on April 26th, Kiawah found a loggerhead nest and Hilton Head had a nesting Kemp’s Ridley in the morning. A nesting Kemp's Ridley is extremely rare! This is only the 4th ever recorded nest in the state of South Carolina.
 
We are trying to be patient for our turtles to arrive at our State Park beach. We know it is only a matter of days and then we will be busy. We have been enjoying the early morning rides down the beach and the beautiful sunrise.
 
Since it is turtle season again, it is so important for us to ensure they have a safe place to nest. We can do this by keeping a distance of 30 feet when seeing a nesting turtle on the beach, not using flashlights when walking the beach, keeping lights off that face the ocean in our beachfront homes, filling in holes we dig, knocking down sand castles, and taking all of our belongings with us when we leave the beach. We want our summer visitor to keep returning year after year, so let’s give her the respect she deserves.

Stay tuned to see when we get our first nest!