Bald Head Island's Sea Turtles Just Had a Season That Erased the Last Two

By mid-August, the loggerhead nesting count posted at Turtle Central read 129 nests. That single number, current as of August 18, sits two nests shy of the combined totals from the previous two seasons put together. In 2024, the Bald Head Island Conservancy's Sea Turtle Protection Team recorded 73 nests for the entire year. In 2025, that number fell again to 58. Add them up and you get 131. This year got within two of matching both of those seasons combined, and did it before the nesting window even closed.

That is not a small rebound. It is the kind of number that changes how you read the last two years, because it suggests the problem was never a vanishing population of turtles. It was something else entirely.

What actually happened in 2025

The 2025 season looked, on paper, like a continuation of a slide that started in 2024. The Conservancy's own executive summary called it the second season in a row of below-average nesting, the lowest since 2017 and 2018, when the island recorded 40 and 52 nests respectively. Fifty-eight nests is a rough number for an island that topped 110 in both 2022 and 2023.

But the summary also contains the detail that changes the story. Through most of the season, the turtles that did show up were doing well. Hatch and emergence success sat above 80 percent, a strong number by any measure, until Hurricane Erin passed through in early August. The storm combined with an unusually high tide event to push water onto the beaches, and the season's final numbers came in at a mean hatch success of 68.5 percent and mean emerge success of 64.4 percent. The nests were there. The storm took the eggs.

That distinction matters if you live here. A season with fewer nests because fewer turtles returned is a population question. A season with fewer nests because a hurricane flooded the ones that were laid is a weather question, and weather questions don't necessarily repeat.

The number that says more than the nest count

Nest totals get the headline, but the Conservancy's data holds a quieter figure that tells you more about how many individual turtles actually came back this year: the number of identified mothers.

In all of 2025, across 130 recorded nesting activities, the team genetically identified at least 21 distinct individuals, and just six of those turtles accounted for more than half the nests laid. That is a small, hardworking group carrying a light season.

This year, the running tally already shows 48 identified mothers, more than double last year's full-season count, with 173 false crawls layered on top of the 129 confirmed nests. A false crawl is what happens when a female comes ashore, tests the sand, and turns back to the water without laying. Biologist Paul Hillbrand told the State Port Pilot in 2024 that a typical season sees more false crawls than nests, because loggerheads are picky about where they'll dig. That year was the outlier: for the first time in his six seasons on the island, false crawls actually ran behind nests. This year the ratio has snapped back toward its usual shape, with roughly 1.3 false crawls for every nest laid, which reads less like a fluke and more like a broader group of turtles going through the ordinary, choosy process of finding the right spot.

More individual mothers, plus a false-crawl pattern that looks normal again, points toward a real return in numbers rather than a handful of especially productive turtles making up for an otherwise thin season.

Here's how the three seasons stack up side by side:

The Conservancy flags its in-season figures as preliminary, and the 2026 numbers will keep moving until the last excavation is logged, likely sometime in the fall. But by mid-August, most of a season's nesting activity is usually behind it. In 2025, the very last nest of the year was laid on August 12. If this year follows that pattern, the 129 on the board right now is close to the final word on how many nests Bald Head Island actually got in 2026.

Where the season goes from here

Nesting winds down through August, but hatching runs much longer. Last year's first hatch came on July 15 and the last nest wasn't excavated until November 5. The year before, hatching started July 17 and the final excavation happened October 29. So even with the laying mostly finished, the island is still weeks, if not months, from closing the book on 2026. As of this update, 71 nests have already hatched or been excavated, with the rest still incubating on a clock that averages a little under 58 days.

That excavation process is open to the public. Three days after a nest hatches, the Sea Turtle Protection Team digs it up to count empty shells against unhatched eggs and release any hatchlings that didn't make it out on their own. It's one of the more accessible pieces of conservation work happening anywhere on the coast, and it's part of what makes late summer on the island feel different from the rest of the year.

There's also a piece of the island's infrastructure calendar tied directly to this data. Roughly 36 percent of all nesting activity on Bald Head Island happens along the shoals near the point, which is why beach renourishment and groin work near that stretch is scheduled to start only after November 15, once the Conservancy can certify no active nests remain in the area. Turtle season isn't just a wildlife story here. It shapes when contractors are allowed to move sand.

The rules that carry the rest of the way

None of this rebound holds up without the basics residents already know:

• Only red light is permitted on the beach after dark. White light, including flash photography and phone flashlights, disorients both nesting females and hatchlings trying to find the ocean.
• Dogs must be leashed from sunset to sunrise during nesting and hatching season, under the island's ordinance.
• Holes and sandcastles need to be leveled before you leave the beach each evening. A hole that seems harmless at 4 p.m. can trap a hatchling crawling toward the surf at 2 a.m.
• If you spot a nesting turtle, an injured animal, or a nest that looks disturbed, the Conservancy's Wildlife Emergency Hotline is 910-457-0089, extension 5.

None of these are new this year. What's new is the reason they matter more right now: there are simply more nests incubating on these beaches than there have been in two years, and the number of turtles that could return in future seasons depends on how many of this year's hatchlings actually make it to the water.

Reading the rest of the season

The gap between 129 and 131 will probably close or widen slightly as the last few nests of the year get confirmed, but the shape of the story is already clear. Two rough years weren't a sign that the loggerheads were leaving. They were a sign that one bad storm can undo a strong season, and that the turtles themselves kept showing up in the meantime. This year, more of them arrived, more were individually identified, and the pattern of false crawls looked like a normal, healthy nesting season again rather than an anomaly.

Barbara Bayles Adams has spent enough seasons paying attention to Bald Head Island to know that this kind of update matters to the people who already call it home, not just the ones weighing a first visit. If you're curious about what a season like this says about life on the island, or simply want to talk about what's changed here lately, Barbara Bayles Adams is glad to share what she's been tracking.