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2022 Hilton Head Sea Turtle Report – A Very Good Year!
We are now at the end of the 2022 Sea Turtle season, and it was a good one. While we didn’t top 2019, we came close – 2022 ended up being the third-best year for nests and the second-best year for hatchlings in the past 15 years! Each year the tremendously dedicated folks at seaturtle.org compile data from our very own Hilton Head Island turtle volunteers and make it available for everyone to see. We take the data, analyze it, and put it in easy-to-read graph form. In 2022 we had around 400 Loggerhead turtles nest on the island, many in Palmetto Dunes. We also had one Green turtle nest…
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2021 Turtles are Hatching
Right on schedule, the 2021 baby turtles are making their way from Hilton Head beaches back into the surf. An estimated total of 79 new Loggerheads have hatched and made it to the ocean. That number will increase significantly over the next few months, probably ending up close to 20,000. Unfortunately, it appears that 2021 will be a slightly below average year for nests on HHI. Over the past ten years, an average of 309 Loggerhead turtles have made nests on our beaches each summer, producing an average of 21,000 Loggerhead babies. As of July 21 we have seen 244 new nests, and while already above the 2018 total of…
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Record Sea Turtles for 2019?
We were on Hilton Head the first week of June and, frankly, I was a little worried. I didn’t see as many Sea Turtle nests as I was expecting. But it looks like I just wasn’t paying attention! SeaTurtle.org just reported 250 nests so far this year. Nesting season technically runs through the end of October (it started in May), and already the experts are predicting a possible 500 nests on Hilton Head Island this year. This would beat the all-time record of 411 nests set back in 2016. For an idea of how significant this is, last year (2018) there were only 179 nests for the entire year. This…
Hilton Head Beach Front Property
