Sand in the Coffee, Vol. 90: the turtles are hatching, turn the porch light off

Turn the balcony light off. I’ll wait.

Good. Now come sit down, because the taped-off square you walked past this morning between the boardwalk and the water is about to open, probably this week, probably somewhere around two in the morning, and whether the hundred or so babies inside it make it to the Gulf depends partly on the light you just turned off.

What the stakes are

From May through October, sea turtles nest on this beach. Loggerheads mostly, the occasional green, and if the volunteers are having a very good year, a Kemp’s ridley. The mother comes up out of the surf at night, digs with her back flippers, lays around a hundred eggs, covers the hole, and is back in the water before sunrise. In the morning the crawl marks look like a small tractor came ashore, thought about it, and changed its mind.

Volunteers walk the beach at first light looking for those tracks. On the Alabama side it’s Share the Beach, in matching shirts, on the sand from Fort Morgan to the state line before you’ve had coffee. On the Florida side it’s the National Seashore folks at Johnson Beach and the county’s turtle people on the rest of the Key. They find the crawl, locate the nest, and mark it: four stakes, tape or string, and a sign that says it’s protected under federal law. Which it is. That square is not a suggestion, and the fine for messing with one is not a suggestion either.

Then, roughly two months after the mother left, the nest “boils.” That’s the actual word. A hundred hatchlings the size of a silver dollar come up through the sand at once, usually well after dark, and go for the water in a rush that lasts a few minutes. It is one of the best things you can see on this coast, and almost nobody sees it, because almost nobody is on the beach at two in the morning with the lights off.

Why the light matters

Hatchlings find the water by heading for the brightest, lowest horizon. For the last few million years that was moonlight on the Gulf. Now it’s a condo.

A lit balcony, a floodlight on a walkover, a phone flashlight held up so the kids can see: the hatchlings turn and walk toward it. Away from the water, into the dunes, toward Perdido Key Drive or Perdido Beach Boulevard. Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, and Escambia County all have sea turtle lighting rules on the books for exactly this reason, and the condo you’re renting almost certainly has a card about it in the drawer nobody opens.

What the rules boil down to for a renter:

• Balcony lights off after dark. All of them. The little one too.
• Close the blinds on any Gulf-facing window with a lamp behind it. From the sand, a lit living room is a lighthouse.
• No white flashlights on the beach at night. Not for the walk, not for the ghost crab hunt, not for the photo.
• Red light is fine. Turtles barely register it. A red headlamp runs about fifteen dollars at any hardware store on either side of the line, and it makes you look like a person who knows what they’re doing, which on this beach at night is worth the fifteen dollars alone.

The holes and the chairs

Fill your holes. Knock the castle down at the end of the day.

A two-foot hole your kid dug at four in the afternoon is a trap at two in the morning, for a hatchling the size of a cookie and for a three-hundred-pound mother trying to get back to the water on flippers that were not designed for climbing. This is also the real reason both sides of the line want your tents, chairs, and toys off the sand overnight. The county’s leave-no-trace rule on the Key and the same idea Orange Beach and Gulf Shores enforce aren’t about tidiness. They’re about a turtle not getting wedged under your canopy in the dark.

So the evening routine, all season: fill the hole, flatten the castle, haul the chairs up. Then turn the light off. It takes four minutes.

If you’re there when it happens

Say you’re walking the beach late, no light, and the sand in front of you starts moving. Here’s the whole protocol.

• Stop. Stay behind them. Between the nest and the dunes, never between the nest and the water.
• No lights. No flash. No phone screen held up high. If you have to look at your phone, turn away from the water and cup it.
• Don’t help. Don’t pick them up, don’t carry them to the water, don’t dig to “get the rest out.” The crawl is the point. They’re imprinting on this stretch of beach, and decades from now the females will come back to it because they walked it once.
• Be quiet and let the volunteers run it if any are there. They may be sitting the nest. Do what they say.
• Call the number on the nest sign. Every marked nest has a hotline printed on it. That’s who to call. Not 911, not the front desk, not me.

And the morning version: a single hatchling on dry sand at eight a.m. is a straggler, and it’s in trouble from the heat and the gulls. Call the number. Shade it with your body while you wait if you have to. Don’t put it in a bucket of water and don’t walk it down to the surf. Call, don’t carry.

If you see the mother instead

Rarer, but it happens on a late-night walk. A loggerhead on the sand is the size of a coffee table and moves like she’s being paid by the hour. Stay thirty feet back, stay behind her, no lights, no noise. If she hasn’t started digging yet and you spook her, she’ll turn around and go back in without laying, and she’ll try again somewhere else another night. Don’t be the reason.

How to actually see one

You can’t book it. But you can improve your odds.

The volunteers know every nest’s lay date, which means they know its window. In Alabama, Share the Beach sometimes sits nests during the window and, a few days after a hatch, does a nest inventory right there on the sand, counting shells and occasionally releasing a straggler or two. Those are public when they happen, and a kid who gets to watch one will bring it up for the rest of the trip. If you see somebody in a volunteer shirt at dawn, ask. That’s the entire trick.

Otherwise, walk the beach at 6:15 and look at the wet sand near a marked nest. Tiny tracks running to the water, like somebody dragged a fork down the beach a hundred times, mean it happened last night while you were asleep. You missed it, but now you know it’s real.

And no, the live cam will not show you this one. It’s dark, it’s two in the morning, and the cam’s job is the sunrise. Some things on this beach you still have to get out of bed for.

The short version

Lights off after dark. Fill the holes, flatten the castle, chairs off the sand. Stay behind the nest, no white light, call the number on the sign. Walk behind the stakes the same way you walk behind the surf fisherman’s rods.

The mother that laid the nest you walked past this morning may have hatched on this same stretch of sand a long time before any of the buildings behind you existed. She found her way back. The least we can do is get out of the way and turn the light off.

— Chris

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