Sea turtle nests broke a record this year. Why that’s a good thing.

Loggerhead sea turtles laid 4,174 nests on Georgia’s beaches, the most in decades.

It continues a slow but steady rebound for the threatened species. Loggerhead sea turtles laid 4,174 nests on Georgia’s beaches, the most in decades.

It continues a slow but steady rebound for the threatened species. “Exhausting, but definitely rewarding,” said Alley, a biologist and curator for the nonprofit Tybee Island Marine Science Center.

The sea turtle baby boom on the small barrier island east of Savannah played out over and over this summer in parts of the Southeast, where the nesting season brought the latest evidence of a slow but steady rebound for the threatened species.

In Georgia, loggerhead sea turtles laid a record 4,174 nests along beaches this year, the most since comprehensive surveys began in 1989 and far in excess of the low of 358 nests in 2004.

The species, which has existed for millions of years and often roams thousands of miles across the world’s oceans, faces a litany of threats — a list that includes getting caught in fishing gear, getting hit by boats, ingesting plastic and other marine debris, and the degradation of natural habitats.

Alley called it “super encouraging” — not to mention a bit dizzying — to see the numbers climb after years of widespread conservation efforts. On Tybee, she said, conservationists found themselves running short on the wooden stakes, metal predator screening and other tools to safeguard fragile nests.

“There were many times during the season we had to go out and buy more supplies, because we had more nests than we expected,” she said of this year’s season. Loggerhead turtle nesting seasons are inherently difficult to predict with precision, and they naturally vary. Part of the year-to-year fluctuation is due to the fact that females tend to nest only every several years.

In a typical nesting season, females may attempt to lay eggs in as many as a half dozen nests. Although nest counts vary each season, the loggerhead population in Georgia has been increasing at about 4 percent annually since the early 1990s, according to state officials.

This year marks the third in the past five summers that the state has exceeded at least 2,800 nests per year, a target set out in the recovery plan for the federally protected turtles. That trend is reassuring, but not as high as it needs to be, Dodd said. “Now, we are kind of in a place where we are at a plateau.

Our highs are kind of in the same spot, and our lows are sort of in the same spot,” he said of recent years. That is likely to remain the case for at least another decade or more, because management and conservation efforts often take time to pay dividends. Eventually, Dodd said, the state needs to average about 5,000 nests annually to cement “long term viability.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said. The steady progress of recent decades has come, in part, from the sustained work of the Georgia Sea Turtle Cooperative, a state-wide network of hundreds of workers and volunteers across numerous academic institutions, government agencies and conservation groups.

Day after day during each nesting season, such groups patrol beaches during all hours, painstakingly monitor and protect nests and collect all manner of data. “Just like the turtles, we’re here every year,” Dodd said in announcing the start of the nesting season this spring. “To monitor wildlife populations you often need a long-term data set to figure out what’s going on.

The more data we have, the better we understand the status of the species.” In Georgia and elsewhere, there have been ongoing efforts to minimize beachfront lighting in many places during nesting season, to stabilize and revitalize natural vegetation and keep shorelines intact, and to educate beachgoers to leave sea turtle nests undisturbed whenever possible.

One of the world’s largest turtles, loggerheads can weigh in at more than 350 pounds and stretch several feet long. In the United States, they nest on beaches from Virginia to Texas. Females reach sexual maturity at around 30 to 35 years, scientists say, and during nesting season usually crawl ashore under cover of darkness to dig nesting holes among the dunes of barrier island beaches.

Loggerheads can live to be 80 years or older. Georgia is not the only place where sea turtle nests flourished this past summer. Florida wildlife officials recently reported a preliminary count of 136,972 loggerhead nests statewide as of Aug. 31, exceeding the previous annual record of 134,930 nests set in 2023.

If confirmed, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said, that would also represent a new nesting record in the state. Other species, such as leatherbacks and green turtles, also had a strong nesting season in Florida, officials said. Back on Tybee, Alley knows that not every year can set records.

But she is hopeful that the steady progress will continue. If the turtles keep showing up, she said, the volunteers will, too. “It’s rewarding to know all the conservation that has been going” is paying dividends, she said.

“Consistency is the main thing.”