First Nest of the 2026 Season

At last the Island Turtle Team has recorded our first nest for 2026. Terri George and Kelsey Willey reported it on their Friday morning patrol. In 2025 Terri and Kelsey found the first Sullivan's Island nest on May 30 at Station 26. With 90 nests already in South Carolina, we have been patiently waiting. Last night a loggerhead crawled ashore on the beach at Sullivan's Island Elementary School located at Station 20 Street and laid her eggs. At first we feared that it might be a false crawl because although the tracks showed a large female, the field signs were not positive. The incoming and outgoing tracks were the same length because the high tide cut both off at the same spot, the body pit was rather small with hardly any thrown sand, and there was no telltale mound of sand that is usually seen at the spot where the eggs were covered. However, there was plenty of broken green Bermuda grass where she dug. The top egg was found quickly by probing and was preserved for our genetics research project at UGA, and the nest was marked to incubate in situ (where it was laid). Congratulations, Sullivan's Island on the first nest of the season!