Hatchling making it to the ocean in daytime emergence

N.E.S.T. received a very generous donation from the Friedman-French Foundation given in the memory of Dale Baker Ray, beloved mother of Pam Braden.  Ms. Ray had lived in Surf City, North Carolina.  The donation will help us to ensure hatchlings get to the ocean, and enhance our public outreach and education efforts.  We are truly appreciative of the gift and extend our sincerest sympathies to the Ray and Braden families.

Rehabbed turtle ready for release

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First fellow out

Hatchlings charging down runway!

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N.E.S.T. President, Tony Parisi, accepted the check from H2OBX Director of Marketing & Sales, Wendy Coulson Murray.  Also in the photo are General Manager, Damian Dondero, Guest Service Manager, Ronnie Flinchum, and two of the plush turtles whose sales benefit N.E.S.T.

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A team of N.E.S.T. volunteers installed signs every mile or so along the 4WD beaches.

N.E.S.T. volunteers recently installed signs along the Corolla 4WD beaches in Currituck County. The 4WD beaches serve many purposes including as the main area roadway, for wildlife habitat and for beachgoers to enjoy the beach. It’s important that all of these uses are protected. The signs encourage drivers to watch for sea turtles and the volunteers who help protect them. Since both are often on the beach at night, it’s especially important for drivers to be on the lookout then. Thanks to the great team of N.E.S.T. volunteers who worked to make this happen!

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A loggerhead sea turtle swims just under the water’s surface. Photo: NOAA

During any given summer on North Carolina beaches, volunteers comb the shores for evidence of freshly laid sea turtle nests.

As the height of tourism season goes on, beachgoers are likely to see brightly colored ribbon tied between stakes used to cordon off carefully buried nests.

Few are likely to witness darling hatchlings emerge to the sandy surface, flipper paddle their way to the waves and disappear in the ocean, taking with them secrets researchers have yet to unlock.

Take, for example, endangered loggerhead sea turtles. We don’t know their average life span, the typical number of nests a female will lay over her lifetime, or how many years she will nest once she reaches maturity.

Nesting females usually lay their eggs under the cover of night, leaving nest scouters, at best, a trail of flipper prints between the stretch of beach that expands and retracts with the tide.

This elusive nighttime nesting ritual usually means volunteers are not out to see females on the beach, much less tag them. Even if a turtle is tagged, that tag may come off.

All of this makes it particularly difficult for researchers to get a good idea of how the loggerhead population is faring in the wild.

For decades now, researchers have counted nests as a way to measure female sea turtle populations.

This is pretty much the worldwide, standard practice, one that leaves more questions than answers, including what’s been happening on beaches from North Carolina to Georgia where loggerhead nest counts are up.

“One of the challenges is when there’s an increase in nests, does that mean that there’s an increase of females or maybe they’ve just had a super foraging year and they’ve got tons of energy and they’re able to lay more nests,” said Matthew Godfrey, sea turtle biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

Now researchers believe they have an answer.

“We confirmed that there’s a pretty strong correlation between the nest counts and the actual female population size,” said Brian Shamblin, an associate research scientist with the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.

Shamblin heads a multistate study that uses genetic tagging to track female loggerheads in the northern recovery unit, an area that spans from the southernmost beach in Georgia up the East Coast to the North Carolina-Virginia state line.

Loggerheads in the northern recovery unit are genetically distinct from those that nest in Florida and other areas of the world.

To better understand how loggerheads in this unit are doing in the wild, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission in 2010 partnered with the South Carolina and Georgia departments of natural resources and the University of Georgia for the Northern Recovery Unit Loggerhead DNA Project.

That partnership was formed after Shamblin in 2006 discovered he could extract DNA from the shells of nonviable sea turtle eggs and use that DNA fingerprint to identify a mother with her nest.

“Because we know each female for each nest we’re able to look at some of the patterns and it does look like the majority of females prefer to stay say within 25 miles or so (between nests) so usually the same island or maybe two islands adjacent to each other,” Godfrey said. “But there are other females that are less faithful and they tend to wander more and they tend to move 200 to 300 miles between nests.”

For example, one loggerhead laid a nest north of Nags Head, swam down to northern Florida to nest there, then headed back up north to Cape Lookout to lay another nest in one season.

“We don’t know why some animals take these extended periods further away,” Godfrey said. “Females don’t tend to nest every year. They nest every second or third or fourth year so you need a long-term dataset to uncover these behavioral trends.”

Through this study, researchers have found that some turtles take as many as seven to nine years off between nesting seasons.

“Which again, is really interesting and we’re not quite sure why,” Godfrey said. “We don’t know if they’re truly taking off that time or maybe those are the ones that went really far south outside of our study area and maybe they’re nesting in southern Florida and that’s why we don’t have a record of them.”

Why the numbers matter

The hope is that the female loggerhead population increase is a result of conservation measures put in place over the last 40 years.

After loggerheads were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1978, the push to save them began.

Volunteer conservation programs began popping up on beach nesting grounds.

Government protections were put into place water and onshore. Environmental windows were created to prohibit things like beach nourishment projects during nesting season.

Shrimpers who initially faced severe restrictions and closures to protect sea turtles now use turtle excluder devices designed to let sea turtles escape from trawl nets.

By the mid-1990s, Godfrey said, nest monitoring and protection was standardized statewide and volunteer groups regularly patrolled nesting beaches between May 1 and Aug. 31.

“Because of this infrastructure of people checking every day for nests we have a built-in sampling opportunity so we rely entirely on our collaborators and volunteers in the state to be collecting these samples for us because they’re the ones out there every day,” Godfrey said.

A sea turtle nest in Emerald Isle is cordoned off by a volunteer group during the summer of 2023. Photo: Jennifer Allen

Each year, thousands of samples are shipped to Shamblin’s lab for DNA testing.

It’s an operation that costs between $100,000 and $150,000 each year in North Carolina, which has received for the past 12 years federal grants through the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Godfrey said state fisheries has also received funds from various sea turtle volunteer organization fundraising efforts.

The Wildlife Resources Commission also receives funding for the sea turtle program and other wildlife research and conservation management projects through the North Carolina Nongame and Endangered Wildlife Fund. North Carolinians who file state tax returns can donate all or a portion of their refund to this fund.

Godfrey said it is crucial the state remain part of the regional loggerhead study.

“To have a better understanding of numbers of females in the population had bene one of the key knowledge gaps in loggerhead natural history,” he said. “The whole goal of management and conservation of loggerheads is to try to get them off the Endangered Specials Act, to try to get them to a place where their population is robust enough that they aren’t considered under threat of extinction anymore.”

Shamblin and other researchers are forging new ways to study loggerheads in order to be able to answer questions about how long they typically live, whether warming seas are affecting the number of males in the population, and various nesting habits.

“I think we’re on the cusp of having some great additional tools to add in so that makes keeping up with this sort of demographic stuff that we’re doing with the genetic tagging really important to try to maintain until those come online,” he said.

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New ATV joins the N.E.S.T. fleet! Left, One Hour VP and General Manager Ron Seidman, Center, Peggy Cathey, N.E.S.T. ATV Coordinator, and on ATV N.E.S.T. President, Tony Parisi.

N.E.S.T. very sincerely thanks One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning for it’s extremely generous donation of a brand new 4WD Tracker 450 ATV! If you look carefully, you can see the ATV has sea turtles drawn on its “skin.” How cool is that! It will join the other ATVs in N.E.S.T.’s fleet used to patrol the 50 miles of N.E.S.T beach from the Virginia line to south Nags Head.  Volunteers ride ATVs looking for sea turtle nesting activity during the summer nesting season from May 15th to August 31st.

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December 2023

Dear N.E.S.T. Partner,

I hope this letter finds you well. We are reaching out to you today to request any support you can provide. N.E.S.T.
is committed to protecting and conserving sea turtles on the Outer Banks and we’ve been working hard to fulfill
that mission but cannot do it alone. That’s why we’re asking for your help.

It’s been another busy year and thanks to the financial support we’ve received, our nearly 500 active volunteers
had the equipment and supplies they needed to continue our mission. This year, they logged over 13,000 hours
searching 50 miles of beach every day during nesting season, identifying, monitoring and protecting 37 nests, and
responding to nearly 100 strandings. The extra effort they provided resulted in over 2,000 hatchlings making it
safely to the ocean.

The tireless work our extraordinary volunteers do is only possible due to your support. Your donations make it
possible to provide all the nesting supplies volunteers need so they wouldn’t have to purchase themselves in
addition to donating all their time. We were able to continue our efforts to replace aging ATVs before they became
unreliable so we had only two minor issues on the beach. A record! We increased our educational efforts,
implementing the sea turtle curriculum in the last of five Dare County elementary schools and providing funding to
replace books and other materials to the other four. We expanded the number of events at which we have
educational booths to a total of 16 in 2023 and will continue the expansion. Generous donations have allowed us
to buy more educational materials, encouraging young and not so young to do their part to protect our beloved sea
turtles.

For the first time in anyone’s memory, a nesting sea turtle was run over on the four-wheel drive beach and had to
be euthanized. We will be buying signs to be posted on the beach so drivers will know to watch out for sea turtles
on the beach during nesting season. Again, the contributions we receive allow us to do this and, hopefully, avoid
another incident.

Every dollar you donate will go directly towards our mission, and every donation, no matier how big or small, will
make a difference to our cherished sea turtles as well as our great volunteers.

Please send your tax-deductible donation to N.E.S.T., P.O. Box 1073, Kitty Hawk, NC 27949, or make an online credit card donation on our webpage at https://www.nestonline.org.

Thank you very much for your continued support.

Tony Parisi, President

The post Its Time for Holiday Giving! appeared first on Network for Endangered Sea Turtles.

Dare County teachers are now using the sea turtle curriculum developed by N.E.S.T. to teach students about our beautiful sea turtles in all FIVE elementary schools. The curriculum project began in 2017 at Kitty Hawk Elementary (KHES) and over the next six years the curriculum was introduced and implemented in a school each year (except for the COVID year). With over 2800 elementary school students, we are building a strong base of our next generation of NESTers. Students and their family and friends are learning about how important the conservation of our sea turtles and the ocean they live in are to our environment.

Mural at the entrance of KHES

In the summer of 2017 a meeting was held at Kitty Hawk Elementary School to introduce the idea of implementing a sea turtle curriculum . After development of a sea turtle curriculum notebook, aligned with the North Carolina State Standards, Louise Vance and Holly Robinson of N.E.S.T. met with the principal, head librarian and grade level lead teachers to introduce and explain our curriculum and the support N.E.S.T. would provide for curriculum implementation in the school. This opened the door to what has turned out to be a very exciting and growing opportunity to educate future generations about our beautiful threatened and endangered sea turtles that live in our children’s own backyard.

Sea turtle corner at the KHES library

In September 2023 we began the implementation of the sea turtle curriculum in Manteo Elementary School, our fifth and final elementary school in Dare County. There are over 2,800 students in the five elementary schools.  The opportunity to  educate these students and their families, who at home hear from their enthusiastic children about sea turtles, provides an expanding network to protect, promote and support our sea turtles. All of the schools continue to teach the sea turtle curriculum in selected grades and expand the resources in the library for all the students in each school.

It was very exciting to meet with the leadership of Manteo Elementary School and Dare County administration this September to begin their implementation this academic year of our final elementary school. Their enthusiasm was obvious and they were already coming up with innovative ideas for projects to expand and support the curriculum. Each of the schools has done fabulous projects along with the curriculum. Kitty Hawk Elementary School created Breakout Boxes, each student answers questions about sea turtles and finally the first group to break open the box with keys wins!! Nags Head Elementary School 5th graders wrote poems and art work about sea turtles and each 5th grade class published a book. Cape Hatteras Elementary did Turtle Tuesday in the library, read books and did beautiful artwork. First Flight did library centered book reading and Q&A to challenge the students. We can’t wait to see what Manteo Elementary students create. These are only one example of the many turtle projects each of these schools have done and continue to do.

Green bottle top sea turtle art at KHES

Each elementary school also implements the sea turtle curriculum as part of their regular NC curriculum since all of the lessons are aligned with the North Carolina standards and learning objectives. The grade that teaches the curriculum as part of the subject of their choice, most often Science, is provided with a trip to the aquarium in Manteo to visit the STAR Center and see the turtles in rehabilitation. They are always so excited when they arrive and Louise and Holly do a presentation with them before they head off into the aquarium. N.E.S.T. pays for the transportation for the trip.

Each school has centered much of the activity and learning in the library. The librarians have been fantastic utilizing the books N.E.S.T. funds for each school. They do all types of reading and research projects in the library and all grades therefore receive sea turtle education.

Wooden sea turtle model and students from Cape Hatteras Elementary School

The schools each also receive a full sized wooden hand painted replica of a loggerhead sea turtle and a soft copy of our beach sign. These are displayed in the library but available as teaching aids for any class. One of the most exciting events for the students is the naming of the replica sea turtle, A school wide competition is held and a big box is put in the library for the name submissions. Again Louise and Holly have the privilege of picking the winner and the student who has submitted the winning name receives a N.E.S.T. T-shirt during an assembly. So far we have Seaweed, Surfer, Salty and Banks!!! We are looking forward to the name of our final loggerhead!!

N.E.S.T. gives support to the schools with library and classroom sea turtle books, visits to the aquarium to see the sea turtles in STAR., and visiting experts. The  WIN of this program is the impact being made on over 2800 young minds…who are now educated, enthusiastic and compassionate about our beautiful sea turtles.

The post Educating the Next Generation of N.E.S.T. Volunteers appeared first on Network for Endangered Sea Turtles.

N.E.S.T. volunteers helping out at the event.

Thank you!!

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The McFate Family presents their donation to N.E.S.T. volunteers

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