The Post and Courier
September 9, 2025
By Tony Kukulich
BEAUFORT — While there are still little sea turtles patiently waiting in their eggs for the signal to emerge from the sand and dash for the waves, the nesting season for mother turtles has drawn to a close.
“It’s been two weeks without any of those large females emerging, so the nesting season is over,” said Amber Kuehn, director of the Sea Turtle Patrol on Hilton Head Island.
The numbers of nests counted by monitoring programs across Beaufort County beaches are rolling in, and a picture of the season is beginning to emerge. All in all, it’s been a decent year.
“We didn’t have a bad season. It just wasn’t the bigger season we were expecting,” Kuehn said.
The number of nests recorded is in on par with 2024. Nest counts from eight Beaufort County beaches — Coffin Point and Daufuskie, Fripp, Harbor, Hilton Head, Hunting, Little Capers and Pritchards islands — recorded 619 nests in total. That was compared to 636 last year.
Though the number is nominally lower, simply counting nests can create an incomplete picture. Sea turtle nesting success is cyclical, with good and bad years to be expected. Further, the level of success or failure can vary from beach to beach. Bad years have bright spots, and success isn’t distributed evenly on every beach.
On Pritchards Island, 61 nests were recorded this season, up from 47 the prior year, a better year to be sure. But researchers counted nearly double the number of hatchlings compared to 2024.
“It’s so much better this year. We have more nests, but didn’t have a storm that destroyed a lot of nests like we had last year,” said Kim Ritchie, associate professor in the University of South Carolina Beaufort’s Department of Natural Sciences and the director of research for Pritchards Island.
In August 2024, torrential rain from Tropical Storm Debby stopped the development of every nest that was incubating when the storm hit, causing the loss of hundreds, maybe thousands, of potential hatchlings. With three weeks still left in the 2025 hatchling season, 4,888 have been counted on Pritchards Island — over 2,000 more than recorded in 2024.
Close to Pritchards Island, Little Capers Island saw a reduction in nests from 53 to 47 and nearly 1,300 fewer hatchlings.
Like Pritchards, responsibility for monitoring sea turtle activity there falls to Ritchie, USCB students and other volunteers. The challenge of monitoring a remote location like Little Capers Island can result in incomplete date.
“We just can’t get out there everyday. It’s hard to get to that island, and there’s a lot of nests that we miss,” Ritchie said.
If there’s one local beach that underperformed this season, it was Hunting Island. The 69 reported nests represent an 85 percent decrease in nests since the prior season. It’s the first year since 2018 that fewer than 100 nests have been counted there.
“It’s just a down a year,” said Buddy Lawrence, who manages the sea turtle program on Hunting Island, adding that 25 years ago, 69 nests would have been a very high number of nests at that location.
Farther down the coast, Sea Turtle Patrol on Hilton Head Hilton Island keeps tabs on turtle nesting on a long stretch of South Carolina shoreline. Despite its large territory, Kuehn said they don’t get the highest number of turtles. That distinction went to Cape Island, located in Charleston County within the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. It boasted nearly 1,000 nests this season.
Kuehn’s volunteers patrol more than 17 miles of beaches on Hilton Head. Using a pair of trucks, they cover the Atlantic beaches, while volunteers walk three beaches along the Port Royal Sound. Based on data proved by genetic testing and turtle behavior, sea turtles generally nest every other year and will lay several nests a season in roughly two week intervals, Kuehn predicted a big year for nests.
“I was expecting around 350 nests, based on who we were expecting back. We know the individuals from the DNA that we take from every nest,” Kuehn said. “We didn’t get the number we were looking for.”
Despite her expectation of a robust season, Kuehn’s organization recorded 237 nests, an improvement from the 204 nests in 2024 but well under her prediction. The reason for the miss might have something to do with the snow that fell in Beaufort County in January.
“The last time this happened just so happened to be after a snow season, as well,” Kuehn said.
Colder-than-normal ocean temperatures may, she conjectured, prevent microscopic organization from developing into food sources for the loggerhead turtles. With a reduced food supply, the female turtles may not have the energy necessary to produce clutches of eggs and they may skip a year.
Following a snow year in 2017, the 2018 season only produced 179 nests. But the following year, the turtles came roaring back and produced a record 463 nests.
“If they go by the last scenario similar to this, then we’ll have a big nesting season in 2026,” Kuehn said. “It’s just a theory. Who knows?”