Sand in the Coffee, Vol. 41: the taped-off squares are somebody's eggs
Twice this week a visitor has asked me, very politely, what the beach is “growing” inside those little squares of wooden stakes and tape up near the dunes. One guess was sea oats. One guess was, and I quote, “science.”
Closer than you’d think. Those squares are sea turtle nests — mostly loggerheads on this stretch — and each one has somewhere around a hundred eggs under it. The beach you’re vacationing on runs a maternity ward from May through October, and mid-July is the crossover shift: mama turtles are still coming ashore at night to lay, and the earliest nests are getting ready to hatch. Right now, both things are happening on the same sand where you built the castle.
So today’s column is the turtle column. Not the guilt-trip version — the practical one, because the rules are few, they’re easy, and following them comes with a real payoff at the end.
Who’s In the Squares
A loggerhead that nests here is usually decades old, weighs a couple hundred pounds or more, and there’s a good chance she hatched on this same stretch of coast back before your rental was built. She’s been coming to this beach longer than anyone reading this, and she doesn’t even leave a review.
She comes ashore at night, drags herself above the high-tide line, digs a nest with her back flippers, lays her eggs, buries them, and heads back to the Gulf — the whole visit maybe an hour or two. Volunteers walk the beach at dawn every single morning in season looking for the tracks she leaves (picture a tractor tire that drove out of the Gulf, made a loop, and drove back in). When they find a fresh crawl, they locate the nest and stake off that square. About sixty days later, usually deep in the night, the sand starts boiling and a hundred hatchlings the size of an Oreo make a run for the water.
That’s what’s in the square. Now the part that involves you.
The Three Night Rules (This Is the Whole Job)
1. Fill in your holes and flatten the castle before you leave. This is the one nobody thinks about and the one that matters most. A hole that’s shin-deep to you is a trap for a two-hundred-pound turtle with no reverse gear, and the Grand Canyon to a hatchling. A sandcastle at midnight is just a wall somebody’s newborn has to climb. Five minutes with a shovel on your way off the beach — that’s the entire ask. Kids treat “destroy the castle” as a bonus activity anyway.
2. Lights out after dark. Hatchlings find the water by crawling toward the brightest horizon, which for a few million years was moonlight on the Gulf. A white phone flashlight, a flash photo, or a blazing balcony fixture can send a whole nest marching the wrong direction — toward Perdido Key Dr instead of the water. So after dark: no white lights on the sand, close the blinds on Gulf-facing windows if the lights are on inside, and if you want to walk the beach at night, use a red light. A red-filter flashlight from any tackle or hardware store works, and plenty of headlamps have a red mode built in. Red light barely registers to a turtle. It also, bonus, doesn’t announce your position to every ghost crab in the county.
3. Take your stuff in at night. Chairs, tents, and wagons left out overnight are an obstacle course for a nesting female. On the Alabama side they’ll haul abandoned setups off the beach anyway, so the turtles and the ordinance agree on this one. Carry it in; your future self at 8 a.m. will find the beach flat, clean, and open.
That’s it. Three rules, all of them things a tired family can do at 5 p.m. without a meeting.
How to Actually See Some of This
Here’s the payoff for good behavior.
Walk at first light. Sunup or just after, before the crowds — Johnson Beach and the quieter crossovers along Perdido Key Dr are prime, and the Romar/Gulf State Park stretch works on the Orange Beach end. You’re looking for fresh crawl tracks from overnight, and if you find volunteers staking a new nest, they are the friendliest people on the beach and will happily tell you everything. Check the beach report before you head out so you know what the flags are doing.
If you meet a nesting turtle at night: you’ve won a lottery — don’t cash it in badly. Stay well back, stay behind her, no lights, no flash, and let her work. She’ll be gone within the hour and you’ll have a story most locals don’t have.
If you see hatchlings: lights off, stand back, and let them crawl — no scooping them “to help,” the march to the water is part of how they wire in where home is. If something looks wrong (hatchlings heading for the road, a turtle in trouble), don’t guess — every nest marker has a hotline number posted right on it. That number rings someone who has handled this exact situation a hundred times.
The squares will start disappearing come fall, the volunteers will hang up their morning miles, and the beach will go back to being just a beach. But some July decades from now, a turtle the size of a coffee table is going to crawl out of the Gulf onto this exact sand, because a hundred tiny ones made it to the water the summer you were here, partly because your family filled in a hole on the way to dinner.
Not a bad line for the vacation scrapbook: we came for a week and left the beach running.
— Chris
