Banner year for sea turtles

On a sunny, windy day at the beach last summer, Phil Schneider saw something almost no one else has — a Kemp's ridley, the rarest of sea turtles, burrowing to lay eggs.

It was only the second time the turtle is known to have nested in South Carolina.

That moment in South Litchfield in July was just one of the surprises in a nesting year that was striking for even veteran turtle watchers. It was one of the best in a long time in South Carolina; 4,500 loggerhead turtle nests turned up — nearly twice as many as last year and more than four times the number in 2004, when the sharp drop-off alarmed environmental managers.

The Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, which usually holds the most nests in the state, had its second best season with 1,431 nests. Neighboring state Georgia had a record year, although with far fewer nests.

"We've got a lot of turtles out there," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Sarah Dawsey.

The nesting season ended Friday. Its striking successes occurred amid a disturbing long-term decline in sea turtle numbers that led the environmental advocate Oceana to press the U.S. Interior Department to review its decision "de-listing" the loggerhead from an endangered to a threatened species.

The spike in numbers gives cautious environmental managers in the region a little spark of optimism for the species. They're also finding more juveniles in the water during sample trawls.

"It's very encouraging. But it has to be taken with a grain of salt," said DuBose Griffin, S.C. Department of Natural Resources sea turtle coordinator. One good year doesn't mean a recovery; nest numbers fluctuate sometimes by the thousands year to year. Researchers look for a rising trend in both high- and low-year nest numbers, she said.

"It doesn't affect the overall downward trend," marine scientist Elizabeth Griffin of Oceana said in a news release about an increase in nesting numbers across the Southeast. She is not related to DuBose Griffin.

The loggerhead is one of those iconic creatures of the Lowcountry coast — a huge, long-lived sea turtle that crawls ashore in the spring and summer to lay eggs in the dunes. It grows to the size of a small kitchen table.

The ponderous mammoth is beloved enough to have drawn a residents' army of volunteers keeping watch on nests up and down the coast.

The rarer leatherback is its much larger cousin, the Kemp's ridley a smaller cousin. The Kemp's is known to nest regularly on only two beaches in the western Gulf of Mexico. Schneider, coordinator of the watch group S.C. United Turtle Enthusiasts, said the Kemp's nest in Litchfield hatched and the hatchlings did well.

Among other surprises this season was an unheard of string of five leatherback nests from Kiawah Island to Garden City. In 27 years of records before this year, only six leatherback nests — in total — have been recorded. The timing of the nesting, though, suggests that the same female might have laid all five.

In what could end up as the coup of the entire year, a loggerhead being treated in the South Carolina Aquarium's rehabilitation hospital abruptly began laying eggs in her tank — something almost never seen. Even in the wild, females often "false crawl" rather than lay a nest; they start up a beach and turn around when there's something they don't like.

Staff are trying to incubate the eggs in "nests" of sand-filled buckets. They haven't had any hatches yet, but there's still hope for a few of the nests.

If they don't see tiny turtles by the time the eggs ought to have hatched, they will comb the sand for survivors to release into the ocean. If they find any, the hatchlings might be the first loggerheads to be incubated.

"There's still a bright chance we could find something," said Kelly Thorvalson, the aquarium's turtle rescue coordinator.

Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.