Caswell Beach Turtle Watch had our last sea turtle nest on Caswell Beach, Nest #63, excavated on Friday, Nov. 8th. It was a lesson in developmental stages and loss. Team 6 diligently checked the nest each day and evening even when it became clear that it wasn’t going to hatch. Per NCWRC Guidelines, we waited for the 90th day of incubation to perform the inventory of the nest contents. It appeared that most of the 72 eggs had reached Stage 25 of development, which would have been about the 40th day of incubation. That correlates with the arrival of Potential Tropical Cyclone 8 on September 16th when the nest was overwashed by the high tides.
We are saddened to end our season with such a big loss, but are grateful for the nest successes that we did have. We had 63 nests and 25 False Crawls. 62 were Loggerhead nests and 1 was a Kemp’s Ridley nest. The False Crawls appeared to be all Loggerheads. With all of the King Tides and storms (Ernesto, Debby, Cyclone 8 and Helene) we only completely lost 3 nests. A few other nests had low hatch rates due to overwash, but our beach success is as follows:
• 75.3% Mean Hatch Success
• 72.3% Mean Emergence Success
• 93.5% Nest Success
Overall Beach Success: 72.2%
This winter Caswell Beach will be receiving sand nourishment. We hope this will aid in replenishing the badly eroding nesting sites of our precious sea turtles! We will share more data on our nesting mamas as soon as our DNA testing is complete. Thank you for your continued love and support!
Full results from all inventories can be seen here.
**This conservation work for protected sea turtles on Caswell Beach is authorized by the NC Wildlife Resources Commission (ES Permit 24ST03).
Please consider donating to our efforts as we build up our necessary resources for next season.
You can donate at Caswell Beach Turtle Watch Donations.
Nest #63 – Last of the Season
