Walk the beach at Coligny or Forest Beach at dawn most Septembers and you'll pass a handful of staked-off nests, orange flagging tape snapping in the wind, spaced out along the dune line like punctuation. This September the punctuation is denser. There are more poles, more tape, more stretches of sand roped off for a nest still working its way toward hatching, and if you've noticed that without knowing why, you're not imagining it.
By August 25, state wildlife data showed turtle teams on Hilton Head had logged 413 nests for the season. In all of 2025, the island's beaches produced 237. That's not a modest uptick. It's close to double, with laying season not even fully closed and the fall hatching stretch still ahead. Hilton Head typically averages around 250 nests a year. This year blew past that baseline before summer ended.
The Number That Doesn't Match Last Year's Beach
If you did an early morning walk here last September, you remember a quieter dune line. This year's density has a real, traceable cause, and it isn't better weather or a lucky season. Sea Turtle Patrol HHI, the volunteer organization that holds the state permit to monitor these nests, flagged 2026 as a likely record-breaker before the season even began, and the reasoning has less to do with 2026 than with what happened the year before.
What a Cold Snap Two Winters Ago Has to Do With Your Beach Walk Now
Loggerheads don't nest on a fixed annual schedule. A female typically returns to shore every two to four years, and whether she shows up in any given year depends heavily on body condition, essentially whether she's eaten well enough to carry a clutch of roughly 120 eggs to shore. Freezing temperatures, even rare ones for this part of the coast, can suppress the food sources loggerheads rely on to build that reserve. Sea Turtle Patrol HHI has pointed to exactly this mechanism: a cold snap that hit food supply hard enough to push some females who would have nested in 2025 into skipping that year and returning instead in 2026.
That matters for anyone walking this beach right now, because it means this year isn't just an unusually good one. It's two years of nesting activity landing in a single season, a normal 2026 cohort stacked on top of the females who deferred from 2025. The pace showed early. By the first days of June, the island's patrol had already logged its 100th nest of the season, a milestone that in an average year doesn't arrive until well into summer, since the full season typically produces only around 250 nests total.
A state wildlife official described the daily reality behind those numbers to Charleston City Paper in late August, after this year's coastwide totals had already surged past prior years up and down the South Carolina coast:
"We cannot cover 300 kilometers of beach without them. They're out seven days a week for six months straight, early in the morning, looking for any signs of activity and documenting any nest that's present."
On Hilton Head, that daily walk covers nearly 28 kilometers of shoreline, from the ocean-facing beaches down to the smaller pocket beaches at Pine Island and Mitchelville Beach, all patrolled before most residents have poured coffee.
Myrtle Breaks the Rule Everyone Else Follows
If the two-to-four-year interval explains why this season looks the way it does, one Hilton Head turtle has spent over a decade beating it. Myrtle, a loggerhead that's been nesting on the island since 2011, returns roughly every other year instead of waiting out the longer stretch most females need. In 2017 she laid eight nests in a single season, the most ever documented here. She's popular enough that local artist Mira Scott painted a statue of her, now standing at Park Plaza, the Hilton Head Airport, and the Sandbox Children's Museum. Myrtle is the exception that makes the interval rule visible. Most females need years to rebuild the reserves this year's cold-snap disruption apparently drained faster than usual, which is a large part of why 2026 looks the way it does and why an unusual number of females are showing up together now.
Two Organizations, One Job Residents Often Merge Into One
Ask around and you'll hear two names used almost interchangeably: Sea Turtle Patrol and Turtle Trackers. They're not the same group, and the distinction matters if you're the one who spots something on the sand. Sea Turtle Patrol HHI holds the state permit, currently under Amber Kuehn, a volunteer with 26 years of nesting-beach experience and a master's degree focused on sea turtle research. Her team is the only one authorized to touch a nest or a hatchling, and they're the ones out at first light marking new tracks, confirming nests, and relocating roughly half of them to higher ground to protect against king tides.
Turtle Trackers is a separate, education-focused volunteer nonprofit. They don't handle nests. Their contribution has mostly happened after dark all summer, clearing the beach of the obstacles that turn a hatchling's short crawl into a fatal one: sandcastles, holes, forgotten beach chairs. If you see someone in a patrol shirt at dawn marking a nest with poles, that's Sea Turtle Patrol. If you see volunteers flattening sand at dusk, that's Turtle Trackers. Both matter, and neither replaces the other.
What an Unusually Loaded Season Means for Your Next Walk
Here's the part that actually changes what September and October look like on this beach. Nests laid later in an already compressed, high-volume season don't finish incubating on the usual midsummer timeline. Incubation runs roughly 60 days, and a big stacked cohort laid through July and into August means a real share of this year's nests are still working through that window right now, into fall. In a typical year, hatching activity thins out by early September. This year, with the count already at 413 and climbing, there's a meaningfully larger number of active nests still due to hatch as the calendar turns toward October.
Practically, that means the beach still needs the same dark horizon it needed in July, later into the season than most residents are used to thinking about. The Town of Hilton Head Island's light ordinance runs from May 1 through October 31, not Labor Day, and if your porch or upstairs windows face the beach, that means:
- Outside lights visible from the sand stay off, or fixtures get shielded and pointed down, after 10 p.m.
- Interior lights visible from the beach get closed off with blinds or drapes at the same hour
- Holes get filled in and sandcastles get knocked down before you leave, since a foot-deep pit is a genuine obstacle for a hatchling half the size of your palm
- If you spot fresh tracks or an unmarked nest, the patrol wants a call to the state wildlife line, not an attempt to help on your own
None of this is new guidance. What's new is how much longer it applies this particular year, and how much more likely you are to actually walk past something happening on the sand between now and Halloween.
I've lived on this stretch of coast long enough to notice when a season doesn't match the rhythm of the ones before it, and this is one of those years. The beach outside your door in September is carrying two years of loggerhead activity at once, which is a strange kind of gift if you're paying attention on your morning walk. It's also a reason to be more careful with the porch lights than you might have been in a quieter year.
If you want a neighbor's read on what's changing around Hilton Head Island, or you're weighing what a home here actually offers day to day, Eoin O'Driscoll is happy to talk it through. Follow your dream, home.
