But monitoring on Masonboro Island reveals25 nests
While the Wrightsville Beach strand saw eight fewer loggerhead sea turtle nests than last year, the 2006 season was still a good one for the Wrightsville Beach Sea Turtle Project, coordinator Nancy Fahey reported last week.
Each year, Fahey compiles a report of the sea turtle season at Wrightsville, which runs May through August, and submits it to town manager Bob Simpson.
“We were all disappointed to only have four nests,” Fahey said, “but there were far fewer strandings this year, so that was good news.”
In 2005, 12 turtles were stranded in the Wrightsville area, including loggerheads Lumina and Hanover, who were injured and transported to the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Topsail Beach, and released in June of this year. In 2006, just three sea turtles were found stranded in the Wrightsville area, including a rare Kemp’s Ridley on May 24, which Wrightsville Beach police found floating in the surf. “It appeared to me that it had most likely drowned,” Fahey said, adding that the two other strandings were loggerheads, one on July 4, which was hit by a boat propeller, and another on July 18 that washed up on the beach, already decomposed.
While fewer strandings is “good news,” Fahey said, “I just hope that doesn’t mean there are fewer turtles out there.”
There were four nests found on Wrightsville, with no “false crawls,” meaning that any turtle that came to nest on the beach this summer was able to successfully lay her eggs.
“I thought it was interesting that two nests were laid early in the season, barely a week apart, and then the last two were laid late in the season, two weeks apart,” Fahey said. “That was kind of odd.”
Two were laid near Stone Street, with the other two on the north end of the beach. Of the four nests, 428 live hatchlings made it safely to the ocean, which is an average of a little more than 100 per nest.
Two hatchlings from two separate nests, named WB and Shelly, that were found on the beach and transported to the sea turtle hospital both later died. “It was very sad,” Fahey said. “But when you take on the care of wildlife, some situations are just uncertain because we don’t necessarily know everything.”
For the first time, UNCW marine biology professor Amanda Southwood and a team of volunteers began monitoring sea turtle activity on the northern 6.5 kilometers of Masonboro Island. The project is funded by the N.C. Coastal Reserve, and the 21 volunteers, including five UNCW undergraduate students, logged more than 400 hours from May 29 to Aug. 29, Southwood said.
“The first season was just sort of for us to assess the degree at which turtles were using Masonboro as a nesting habitat,” she explained.
The volunteers found a total of 25 nests, which was “pretty impressive,” Southwood said. “Unfortunately, we also discovered that there are foxes living on Masonboro Island,” she added. “We confirmed that 13 of those nests were definitely predated on by foxes, so those nests were lost.”
The fate of the other nests is not known, Southwood said, because of the limitations of monitoring the island. “We did not observe hatchling crawls for those nests,” she added.
Funding for 2007 has been procured, so Southwood said she is considering “other conservation measures,” such as traps or fencing, to make sure the nests hatch successfully next<
