Story by Sue Conerly and photos by Jeff Conerly

Everyone is thrilled when a mama turtle lays her eggs on our beaches.  People line the “runway” when the baby turtles decide to bubble up out of the nest and head back to the sea.  But after all the excitement dies down, one more step is necessary to help better understand and keep records of what happened with each nest.

 

(left) Sandy Sly carefully digs into a loggerhead turtle's nest.  Marcie Anderson counts the turtle shells while Pat Crist records the data.

(right) A pile of empty shells is all that's left fro the hatched turtles, along with the three intact eggs that were discovered in the nest.

 

Recently Sandy Sly—a trained turtle volunteer with the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center—did an analysis of a natural nest on north Topsail Island.  Marcie Anderson and Pat Crist, also long-time volunteers, assisted Sandy as they counted and recorded the data.   

The nest was determined to be a loggerhead turtle’s nest and since it was a natural nest there had to be a count to determine the number of eggs that were laid and then the number that were hatched.

 

 

(left) - Only authorized turtle volunteers are allowed on the dune, but others who are interested in the turtles or the analysis process often watch from the beach. 

 

 

For this specific nest, there were 125 eggs with three eggs that had no hatchlings.  After candling the three eggs—testing each egg by looking at it against a bright light—two were non-discernable and one was perhaps viable.  The viable egg was reburied in the same dune to give the turtle more time to possibly hatch out.
 
After the analysis was completed, a report was filled out on a Federal form and sent to the North Carolina state sea turtle coordinator, Matthew Godfrey.  The Topsail Turtle Project and the Karen Beasley Center have a special federal permit that allows them to be on the dunes while studying and protecting an endangered and federally protected species.  Those trained volunteers who work in the project are the only ones authorized to tamper with a nest, eggs, or hatchlings.

This year, Tropical Storm Ernesto took a toll on some of the turtle nests, washing some out to sea during exceptional high tides.  For every nest, care is taken to cordon off turtle nests to protect them from the curious and to discourage people from walking on them and possibly damaging the nests and ultimately the turtles.  Turtle volunteers do a fabulous job of taking over where mama turtles leave off, protecting the nests.

 

 

 

(left) - Once the analysis is complete, the egg shels are returned to the original nest and covered again with sand.

  

 

Turtle nest analysis isn’t as exciting as a mama laying eggs in the moonlight or little baby turtles making their way to the sea, but it’s a necessary step in the process that helps make the other two events as successful as possible.  Thanks to those turtle volunteers who give of their time to do not only the fun work to help our turtles, but the hard and tedious work, too.

JEFF and SUE CONERLY work together to capture their love for the island in photos and words.