First sea turtle nest found in Beaufort County this season
By Delayna Earley
The Island News
While many were celebrating Cinco de Mayo on Sunday, members of the Fripp Island Loggerhead Patrol were celebrating for a different reason.
The first sea turtle nest of the season in Beaufort County and the second in the state was found on Fripp Island’s beach on Sunday, May 5.
The sea turtle nesting season began on May 1, and Karen Natoli, project leader for Fripp Island Loggerhead Patrol, said that this is the earliest that she can remember a sea turtle nest being found on Fripp Island.
“Usually, Hilton Head [Island] or Hunting [Island] is the first to have a nest,” Natoli said.
The nest belonged to a loggerhead sea turtle mother and was found on the south end of the island.
The turtle laid more than 100 eggs – 99 viable eggs and 6 spacer eggs, which are non-viable.
Natoli dug a new nest for the eggs and members of the group transferred the eggs to their new home.
A triangular space was marked off with white poles, tape and a sigh from DNR.
“We try to make our nests as discrete as possible so that we don’t draw too much attention to them,” Natoli said.
Typically, Fripp Island does not see their first turtle nest until around Mother’s Day or later, according to Natoli, so the group was pleasantly surprised to see the nest. The group patrols the three miles worth of Fripp Island beach every morning before beachgoers arrive to enjoy their day.
“We probably won’t see any more activity for a few more days at least,” Natoli said.
Even though the nest was found on Sunday, as of Tuesday, May 7, Fripp Island is still the only beach in Beaufort County to report a nest according to the tracker at seaturtle.org.
The first nest in the state was recorded in Garden City by the Garden City Surfside Sea Turtle Guardians group on April 29, two days before the six-month season officially started.
Since Sunday there have been five more reported nests statewide.
Natoli said that typically the first sea turtle activity that they see on the beach are false crawls, which is when a mother turtle comes ashore to nest but gets scared for some reason and goes back into the ocean.
While a lot of the Fripp Island Loggerhead Patrol’s job is to locate sea turtle nests and protect them, Natoli said that due to the nature of the types of property on Fripp Island, they have to spend a good bit of time re-educating people on important sea turtle season rules such as keeping lights off of the beach, cleaning up all tents, chairs and trash off of the beach and not making too much noise at night.
“We have people who live here full time, but we get a lot of vacationers as well who don’t really know that the lights can be a problem for the sea turtles,” Natoli said.
In addition to relocating the nest found on Sunday, the Fripp Island Loggerhead Patrol took one of the eggs for genetic testing.
The group sends one egg per nest to the University of Georgia’s Northern Recovery Unit, which is a research project to track not only the genetics of the sea turtles, but their nesting habits.
Natoli said that the island typically sees an average of 100 nests per season – last year loggerhead sea turtles laid 118 nests on Fripp Island.
She said people are always asking how they can help, and while you must receive special training and a permit from SCDNR to relocate and mark off sea turtle nests, there is still a lot that people can do to help protect these beautiful animals.
Removing all tents, chairs and personal property from the beach; dismantling sand castles and filling in holes; keeping artificial lights off the beach at night; keeping the beaches clean of all plastic and balloons; following boating laws; and, of course, if you see a sea turtle do not touch it and observe it from a distance.
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
