First sea turtle nest of the season found on Outer Banks’ Hatteras Island
FRISCO — A loggerhead nest near Frisco on Hatteras Island on Saturday marks the first recorded sea turtle nest of the year on the Outer Banks.
Cape Hatteras National Seashore posted on social media Monday morning that park biologists found the nest and installed “a resource protection area” around it.
The sea turtle nesting season on the Outer Banks typically runs from May through September.
Female sea turtles dig nests in the sand, lay their eggs, then cover the nest before returning to the ocean.
Loggerheads use Earth’s magnetic field as a guide to return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs, according to an April 18, 2018, article in The New York Times.
Loggerheads are the most common sea turtle species that nest on Outer Banks beaches.
Last year, the seashore recorded its first nest just one day later, on May 12, also near Frisco.
“Over the past 20 years, there have only been three times a first nest has been found outside the month of May at Cape Hatteras National Seashore,” spokesperson Mike Barber said in an email.
In 2007, the first nest was found in mid-April. In 2005 and in 2010, the first nests were found in early June, according to Barber.
Last year, park biologists found a late nest on Oct. 29, and then the latest nest ever recorded in North Carolina on Dec. 3.
The previous late nesting record for both the park and the state was Oct. 31, 2020.
Cape Hatteras National Seashore recorded 380 nests last year, marking its second-highest nesting season on record. The highest was 2019, with 473 nests, according to park information.
By species, last year’s nests comprised 324 loggerheads, 52 green turtles, three Kemp’s ridleys and one leatherback.
Six sea turtle species are native to United States waters, all of which are listed as endangered and are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Four of those species are known to nest on the Outer Banks, although two rarely do.
The seashore in its Monday post reported several other records that were broken last year, in addition to the latest nest.
The 2023 season saw the most green sea turtle nests ever recorded in one season, at 52. The first successful leatherback hatch since 2007 took place. Also, last year’s 456 false crawls — when a female sea turtle returns to the ocean without laying eggs — was the highest number recorded.
False crawls can be spurred by too much light pollution near the beach, the presence of people or other factors that make the turtle change her mind and not nest, according to an Aug. 26, 2020, article on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website.
Regular sea turtle monitoring at Cape Hatteras National Seashore has been ongoing since 1997, when the resource management division was formed.
