Baby steps: It's a record year for turtles at Cape Hatteras

CAPE HATTERAS, N.C.

They stood around an empty nest, little more than a hole in the sand where the miracle of life had already come and gone. They watched as a man in a green uniform lay flat on the beach and thrust his entire arm deep into the sandy ground.

Another man in a green uniform cautioned the crowd not to expect much.

"If we find a live hatchling, that's a bonus," said Eric Frey, a biology technician at Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

Moments later, a loggerhead turtle the size of a potato chip emerged from the hole. It wiggled in Frey's hand.

The crowd responded with a barrage of clicking cameras usually reserved for celebrities on red carpets. Children stood on their tiptoes to come eye-to-eye with the tiny creature. A woman wept tears not quite hidden by sunglasses.

"This little guy, or girl - I don't know what the sex is..." Frey said as he held a tiny, sand-

covered turtle struggling to swim through the air. "This little hatchling will, hopefully, grow to adulthood."

Turtles typically lay 80 to 90 eggs per nest; in this particular nest, technicians found 110 hatched eggs.

Frey spoke to a group of about three dozen people gathered Thursday evening on a beach between Frisco and Hatteras Village on the Outer Banks.

They came to watch park technicians excavate a turtle nest that had hatched 72 hours earlier.

It's a routine that park officials do to learn what they can about the rare turtles that lay nests on Cape Hatteras National Seashore. But they don't always invite the public.

By the demonstration's end, the crowd witnessed four baby turtles take their first steps on wet sand and into the ocean. Their chances of making it to adulthood are slim, but loggerhead turtles can reach 350 pounds.

"It's amazing to me how this all works," said Theresa Schwinghammer, 43, of Indiana.

With 153 nests, this is a record year for turtles at Cape Hatteras National Seashore - 68 miles of federally owned, public ocean shoreline managed by the National Park Service.

Three species of sea turtles - the loggerhead, green and leatherback - nest within the park, but only two are common. Leatherback turtles are considered federally endangered and rarely nest on the Outer Banks, the northernmost tip of their range.

"When we get (leatherback) nests up here, it's just kind of an anomaly," Frey said.

Loggerhead turtles are by far the most common. Of this year's 153 nests, only six are green turtles.

Turtles in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina are also "all having better-than-average, if not record, years," Frey said.

Regionally, the most likely explanation is an abundance of food, he said.

Loggerhead turtles eat mostly horseshoe crabs and blue crabs, while green turtles are vegetarians that eat algae and sea grass.

On Cape Hatteras, there's another factor that might be contributing to the turtles' success, but it's too early to say for sure.

Endangered turtles and shorebirds are at the center of a heated debate between environmental groups and beach-access preservationists, with the National Park Service caught somewhere in the middle.

Efforts to protect endangered animals often clash with the seashore's traditional role as a recreation resource.

The National Park Service banned summertime beach night driving in 2008, and nests have been flourishing on Hatteras ever since, Frey said. Before the rule was implemented, the record number of nests was 99, he added.

The ban on night driving protects turtles because it decreases the amount of artificial lights - from headlights, for example - and the number of people on the beaches.

Beach access is being further regulated by a court-sanctioned consent decree that is serving as an interim management plan until the Park Service implements a new one next year.

But John Couch, president of a local access advocacy group, the Outer Banks Preservation Association, said he is skeptical that the record number of turtle nests has anything to do with the regulations.

"We're happy that numbers are up," Couch said. "(But) to say and single out that either the ban on night driving or the consent decree had anything to do with it is misleading and disingenuous."

Couch pointed to turtles' success all over the Southeast and cautioned people not to correlate record numbers with access regulations until the matter is studied in depth.

Frey agreed that it's tough to say how much of a difference the night-driving ban has made, because nearly all other beaches in the Southeast established the same rule before Cape Hatteras did in 2008.

"Right now, we don't really know," he said.

Erin James, (252) 441-1711, erin.james@pilotonline.com