Our nesting season is coming to a close with 41 nests marked on PCB this season. Of those 35 were loggerhead nests and 6 were green nests. Unfortunately, many nests were washed out by Tropical Storm Bertha. Any nest that still had stakes standing has been monitored for hatch activity. All nests washed over by Bertha have now hatched or been excavated. As of today, we have four nests still incubating on the beach.
Our hatching season began in late July with our first hatch on July 29th. Our volunteers have been monitoring our remaining nests and we have seen some hatch success from a couple of nests that waves washed over during July’s Tropical Storm Bertha. The four nests remaining on the beach now were laid after TS Bertha so they didn’t encounter the washover from that storm. We hope it stays that way through late October when the final nest should finish incubating.
To date, eleven of our nests have had hatchlings emerge. This low success rate is because TS Bertha’s washover either completely washed out nests or stopped egg development. We just announced the excavation of our most recent hatch, our third green nest will be excavated Wednesday.
We don’t announce the location of our nests or any predicted hatch dates. If you are fortunate enough to be on the beach and see hatchlings with no volunteers present, please call the number on the blue nest sign or PCB non-emergency police and they will contact us.
We have our PCB Turtle Watch merchandise available for purchase at our local excavations. In October, we’ll offer an online sale of any remaining inventory.
We have a great current team of volunteers (trained by FWC and locally earlier this year). Any Bay County residents interested in volunteering can contact us via our website turtlewatch.org or here on Facebook expressing interest.
Stay tuned as we continue through our hatching season. Help keep our beaches Clean, Dark and Flat.