OAK ISLAND, N.C. — If you’re walking along North Carolina’s beaches this month, chances are, you may see some fascinating tracks in the sand. Those are baby sea turtle tracks! Many nests along the coast have been hatching and those baby turtles are taking their first steps and making their way to the Sargasso Sea.
What You Need To Know
The Caswell Beach Turtle Watch not only protects the turtles while they’re still in their eggs, they also perform an excavation on the nest after the hatching
Excavations happen 72 hours after the initial hatch, giving volunteers a time to count the hatched and unhatched eggs to send that data in to the state
Sometimes, those volunteers will even be able to help a trapped live hatchling out of the sand and eggshells and help them make their way to the ocean
“About three days, 72-plus hours after the nest hatches, we dig up the contents of the nest, check the eggs for how many eggs are hatched and unhatched,” explained Jamie Lloyd, the co-coordinator of the Caswell Beach Turtle Watch. “If there are any live hatchlings, that’s really exciting because we get to help them out of the bottom, underneath their brother and sister’s eggshells, so we get to pull them out and let them take their walk to the ocean.”
At their most recent excavation, they did find some live hatchlings! Those baby sea turtles were trapped in the sand, unable to push through the weight of it. If that wasn’t enough, they were also being attacked by ants and ghost crabs — common predators at Caswell Beach.
If it weren’t for the excavation, they never would have been able to make their way to the ocean. For Lloyd, giving those turtles a second chance is an incredible feeling.
“It never gets old, every time you see a hatchling, it’s still very exciting,” Lloyd said. “You get all the tingles and the special feelings, it’s great.”
And those are just a few of the turtles she’s gotten to help. Caswell Beach has 87 nests this summer, half of which have already been hatched and excavated, and the results from those excavations have been very exciting.
“The nests have been doing great,” Lloyd said. “We’ve had 86 to 92 to 93 percentiles of hatchling success, so we’re excited about that.”
And although so many of those hatchlings have made their way to the ocean, they still have a long journey ahead of them. They’re heading to the Sargasso Sea in the Gulf Stream, about a two-day trip. Along the way, they’ll face predators of all shapes and sizes.
“It’s a pretty tough journey for them,” Lloyd said. “1 in 100 to 1 in 1,000 make it to the Sargasso Sea and then 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 make it to adulthood.”
Regardless of the long journey ahead of them, what matters most is that these hatchlings, who were originally stuck in their nest, now have a chance.
The team’s most recent excavation had 100 hatchlings make it to the ocean out of the 130 eggs laid. Five of those hatchlings were from the excavation.
The Caswell Beach Turtle Watch’s efforts to help the turtles in their nesting process is showing major results. Lloyd said that their primary turtle, the loggerhead turtle, used to be an endangered species but has now been bumped up to listed as threatened, something she credits to the conservation efforts over the last 30 years.
To learn more about the Caswell Beach Turtle Watch, you can visit its website here or their Facebook page here.