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Raye Ann Osborne
Turtle Team members Mary Pringle, Diane Brumley and Jenn Gragg follow tracks of a loggerhead that nested in the Maritime Forest.
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We have known for some time that the Maritime Forest on Sullivan’s Island protects against storm surges and is a valuable stopover for migratory birds to rest and feed. But, until this month, we never knew it could also be a nesting habitat for loggerhead turtles. On June 12, Diane Brumley and Jenn Gragg discovered that a nesting turtle crawled ashore between the Sand Dunes Club path and Station 18. She encountered not only an escarpment from recent erosion but also many small, dead trees that have recently been exposed on the beach. When this happens, people call it a boneyard beach because of the skeletal remains of trees that have died from saltwater inundation. This has happened on Capers, Bull and Hunting islands and many other places along the South Carolina coast.
When the Turtle Team followed her tracks for about 40 yards, we saw that she kept trying to find a dry and elevated spot to lay her eggs, crawling an obstacle course around the dead trees and looking for a spot that would not flood and kill her eggs. Along the way, she bumped into an eroded wall of sand eight or nine times before finally making it up into the edge of the Maritime Forest, where she managed to get up off the flat beach.
She crawled into the forest, where she knocked down some dog fennel and dug up some dewberry vines. The tide had gone into the forest beyond her nest, so we knew it would likely go there again and flood the nest. She laid her eggs at the foot of a dead tree that we recognized as the spot where a few seasons ago a red-tailed hawk sat watching loggerhead hatchlings coming out of a nest on the beach at midday. The hawk had swooped down and ate at least three tiny turtles before we were able to scare it away.
Because of debris and spartina wrack, this egg chamber was a little difficult to locate, but we did find a large clutch of 140 eggs and moved them out onto an elevated dune nearby for safe incubation. Erosion is also a problem along the area of the Isle of Palms near Breach Inlet, where turtles are not finding any dry beach before they encounter a high vertical wall of sand that they are unable to climb.
The portion of nesting season when eggs are being laid was about halfway complete on June 21, the day of the summer solstice, with nest numbers slightly lower than in 2022.
