Another Record Year For Turtles

Here in Englewood, at the start of August, we are just passed mid-point in Turtle Season. The official season runs May through October. News from the beach is, a huge increase in nests and turtle activity in spite of losses caused by Tropic Storm Colin in early June. Turtle patrol volunteers across the board (beaches) are working longer hours and reporting exhaustion from staking all the new nests, keeping records up-to-date, and logging in the many false crawls.

With this in mind, my husband, himself a turtle patrol volunteer on Zone 6 North Manasota Beach, and I set out with notebook and camera to see if this increase was as reported. Thursday’s visit was made by husband Al to Zone 4, a half mile stretch of very natural and sparsely populated beach on North Manasota Key. Saturday we visited neighboring Zone 5.

An explanation here about the word “zone.” The Coastal Wildlife Club of Englewood oversees all sea turtle monitoring here. The beach is divided into about “zones” from Boca Grande in the South, to Casperson Beach in Venice. Each zone is about a half mile in length and has a designated number and team of volunteers. Manasota Key alone has 20 zones.

Both zones 4 and 5 were bristling with enormous quantities of the brightly painted yellow stakes that mark a nest. Zone 4 is just a half mile stretch of beach, but it has an excess of 300 marked nests and is still experiencing new nests, not to mention twice that number of false crawls. A false crawl is when a turtle comes up on land and returns to sea without making a nest. It leaves a track like an inverted “U”. Saturday at Zone 5, we logged in the newest nest, number 296. Mind you, there are still two months left of turtle season, though the peak in nesting was reached two weeks ago and the curve is beginning to drop. These numbers are significantly higher than any experienced since records began. And there will be more.

Now the emphasis is on hatch-out and hatchling safety. Watch is kept for many predators, and for tiny hatchling tracks leading to the water. One of the biggest perils to hatchlings is caused by light disorientation. The newly emerged turtles are programmed to head for the light reflected off waves and water, (think moonlight and starlight) but easily will follow the brightest visible glow, which is often man made. This can lead them to death. Darkness and lack of obstructions on beaches is key.

Walking with volunteers John Leon and Bob Cowger on Zone 4, and Karin Drury and Ilse Hattop on Zone 5, gave us a first hand look at the incredible abundance of new nests, as well as the many activities involved in turtle patrolling. Duties just begin with the staking of a nest and recording it in a book. Recorded also are false crawls, followed by cleaning predated nests, excavating hatched nests, counting eggs and more.

Getting up at 5:30am, leaving the house in darkness (not an easy feat for this night owl) is practiced by patrollers for the all important dawn arrival at the beach at 6:30am. Turtle patrol volunteers, like dairy farmers, do not get a lot of sleep during “season” and their dedication is awesome.

There is, of course, the closeness with nature benefit. Walking Saturday on Zone 5, I saw a pink-skied dawn with incredible cumulous clouds. Later, an enormous fish boil roiled the water as tiny sardines leapt to their death by beaching themselves. This was followed by shore birds lining up to eat them! A flock of showy Royal Terns with their orange beaks and “Ronald Reagan” hair preened on a sand bar. Most exciting, we were called by cell phone to see a freshly discovered Green Turtle Nest, huge in its size and sand displacement, like a mini bomb gone off.

Done at 8:45am, we headed back to our cars. Taking a farewell look at the Gulf, a partial rainbow had made a bow between two clouds – a smile and a blessing. Yes, the nest numbers all over the Key are breaking records. We saw it ourselves. Now here’s hoping that rainbow keeps the good luck going for the rest of the season and the hurricane season quiet.