Holden Beach Had a Record Turtle Season This Summer. Here's the Catch.

On the night of May 21, a loggerhead came out of the surf on Holden Beach and dug a chamber in the sand, laid 121 eggs, and crawled back into the Atlantic. The Holden Beach Turtle Watch Program marked it Nest 1. Fifty-six days later, on July 16, that nest boiled. Sixty hatchlings scrambled down the beach that first night. More followed over the next few days before the patrol closed the nest out, and by the final count, 95 of the original 121 eggs had produced a hatchling that made it to the water.

That single nest is a smaller version of the story playing out across the entire island this summer. Nest counts are up. Way up. But the same heat pushing that number higher is also working against the eggs underneath the sand, and the people who patrol this beach every morning at dawn are the first to say so.

The number that made the news

By late July, the Holden Beach Turtle Watch Program had logged 69 nests for the season, according to WECT's coverage of the patrol, already ahead of where the count stood at the same point the year before. Project coordinator Steve McNeill told the station the season had already passed last year's entire total, and with more than a month of nesting still to go at that point, the patrol expected the number to keep climbing.

To understand why that matters, it helps to see the year against its neighbors. The patrol's own historical data, going back to 1990, puts the average season at 46 nests. Here's how recent years have stacked up:

A season that produces twice as many nests as the year before sounds like unambiguous good news for a threatened species. On a beach where the entire ocean-facing shoreline gets walked by ATV every morning starting at 5 a.m., a bigger number usually means volunteers are simply finding more of what's already there. This year, though, the story splits in two directions at once.

Hot chicks, cool dudes

Sea turtle eggs don't have sex chromosomes the way mammal eggs do. The temperature of the sand around the nest during a window in the middle of incubation determines whether a hatchling develops as male or female. Above roughly 85 degrees, nests trend female. Volunteers on Holden Beach have a shorthand for it: hot chicks, cool dudes.

This year's sand has been running hot for weeks at a stretch, without the rain that normally cools things down between systems. Deva Tucker, the patrol's president, told WECT that a long stretch of heat without rain can sway the ratio of male to female hatchlings, and that over years, too many females could eventually become a problem for the population rather than a boost to it.

Donna McGowan has volunteered with the patrol for 17 years. She's seen enough nest excavations to know what heat damage looks like once you dig past the sand.

"It's very troublesome when you go in to excavate and inventory, and you see some unhatched eggs, and you open it, and it looks like it's been cooked."

That's not a metaphor. It's a description of what happens when incubation temperatures climb past what an embryo can survive, and it's happening on a beach that is, at the same time, setting a modern nest-count record.

Nest 1 is a small, concrete example of the tradeoff. Of its 121 eggs, 95 produced a hatchling that reached the water, a survival rate of about 78 percent. The patrol's own 35-year historical data, covering 1990 through 2024, works out to roughly 80 percent across an average season. One nest is not a trend, but it's the kind of on-the-ground detail that explains why a record nest count and a worried patrol coordinator can both be true in the same season.

Thirty-seven years of dawn patrols

The Holden Beach Turtle Watch Program didn't start as a nonprofit with an ATV and a permit from the state. It started in 1989 in Judy Bryan's garage, with a handful of neighbors who wanted to keep track of what was happening on their beach. Nearly four decades later, the same basic method is still in place, just with more people running it.

Every morning starting May 1, a rider covers the entire eight to nine mile stretch of Holden Beach's shoreline, from the Intracoastal Waterway on the east end to the Intracoastal on the west, looking for the double set of tracks a nesting female leaves behind. When a crawl turns up, the morning caller assembles a small team to find the nest, mark it, and in some cases relocate it if it's too close to the tide line or blocking a beach access path. One egg from each new nest gets sent to the University of Georgia for DNA testing, which lets researchers track individual females across seasons and beaches.

Beth Baker, another longtime volunteer, put the human side of this work simply when WECT asked how the team was holding up in the heat.

"I would say we suffer more than the turtles do, that's my guess."

The turtles, she said, manage on instinct. The people doing the watching are the ones pulling overnight shifts on the sand, waiting for a nest to boil.

What's happening on the beach right now

Nesting season on Holden Beach runs May 1 through August 31, which means the window for new nests closes in a matter of days. Hatching, though, continues well past that, typically into October as the nests laid in July and August work through their incubation period. If you live here or spend your evenings on the beach, this is close to peak season for actually seeing something happen.

A few things worth knowing for the next few weeks:

• The patrol still holds Turtle Talks on select Wednesday evenings at 7 p.m. at Holden Beach Town Hall through August, with a short video and a chance to ask volunteers questions directly.
• The program's adopt-a-nest sponsorship, launched at the start of this year, lets residents sponsor a nest for $125, with updates and an electronic certificate sent through the season. Availability depends on how many nests get laid, so it fills up fast in a busy year like this one.
• If you're in an oceanfront home or renting one, keeping outdoor lights off between May 1 and October 31 matters more in the final stretch of the season than at almost any other point, since disoriented hatchlings that head toward light instead of the surf rarely find their way back on their own.
• Filling in holes before dark and clearing beach gear off the sand each evening keeps the path clear for both nesting females and hatchlings making their run to the water.

None of this requires special access or a volunteer badge. It just requires knowing the season is close to its hinge point, with nesting winding down and hatching about to take over as the main event.

The number that actually matters

Every outlet covering this season is going to lead with the nest count, and it's a genuinely good headline. But the count alone doesn't tell you whether the season was good for the turtles. A record number of nests laid in sand that's too hot to finish the job produces a very different outcome than the same number of nests in a normal year. The patrol won't have a full read on that until the last nests close out this fall and the hatchling and DNA numbers get tallied against the eggs laid.

Nest 1 already gave a preview. More nests, slightly lower survival, and a season that will likely skew more female than any in recent memory. Whether that turns out to be a blip or the start of a pattern is the number worth watching once the shells get counted in October, not the one making headlines in July.

If you're the kind of person who reads beach ecology stories for fun and also happens to think about property on Holden Beach from time to time, that's exactly the kind of local detail Steve Adams & Associates pays attention to year round. Reach out anytime you want a read on the island that goes past the surface.