By late June, volunteers with the Amelia Island Sea Turtle Watch had marked more than 200 sea turtle nests along the island's 11.5 miles of coastline, a milestone the group's leaders say is rarely reached so early in the season. That sounds like unambiguous good news, the kind of headline that makes you picture more hatchlings scrambling toward the surf this fall than you've seen in years.
It doesn't quite work that way. A record nest count on this beach has never meant a record number of turtles that survive. What it actually means, for anyone who walks this shoreline regularly between now and Halloween, is a bigger, more compressed stretch of marked-off sand, more excavation events squeezed into fewer weeks, and a small corps of permitted volunteers stretched further than usual. That's the story worth understanding before you plan your next evening walk past Main Beach or out toward Peter's Point.
The number behind "record season"
The average for the 11 years at the end of June would run about 130 nests, according to Bill Bokram, who manages the nonprofit's nesting data. By June 30 this year, the count stood at 215, a jump that wasn't just a good year. According to the nonprofit's records, only one other year, 2019, has surpassed 200 nests by the end of June during the organization's 12 years of compiled data. By the time the season passed its halfway mark in late July, local coverage was calling it record-breaking territory, a description that held up against more than a decade of the group's own tracking.
Most of what's out there belongs to one species. The overwhelming majority of nests belong to loggerhead sea turtles, the species most commonly found on Amelia Island, though volunteers have also documented at least one green sea turtle nest and one leatherback nest this season. That mix is fairly typical for this stretch of coast. What's unusual is the volume.
AISTW's president, Ronda Bokram, put the rarity in plain terms:
"It's rare that that happens... It's a really exciting year, actually."
Why the count is up, and why nobody's fully sure
Turtles don't nest on a fixed schedule. Ronda Bokram noted that sea turtle nesting numbers naturally fluctuate because female turtles do not return to nest every year, taking a year or two off before coming back. Bill Bokram's working theory ties that pattern to food supply. He said increasing loggerhead nesting numbers have been observed along much of Florida's Atlantic coast, and researchers believe food availability may influence how frequently female turtles return to nest, since a turtle might wait another year before coming back if its food supply isn't strong. Under that theory, 2026 was simply the year enough females decided the timing was right at once.
There's a second, more local factor worth naming, even though the biologists don't cite it directly. In 2025, a beach renourishment project overlapped with nesting season on the island's south end, and volunteers had to relocate 20 nests to keep the work from disturbing them. This year's Kings Bay renourishment project, which placed sand on a stretch of beach near Fort Clinch State Park, was finished by March, months before the first nest of the season went in the sand on May 8. Whether an undisturbed beach at the start of laying season played any role in the numbers is not something AISTW's data can prove. But it's the kind of small operational detail that only shows up if you're tracking what happens on this beach year over year, not just this year in isolation.
What "record" doesn't guarantee
Here's the part that gets lost in a headline about a big nest count: more nests laid has never translated cleanly into more turtles that make it. Long-standing estimates for hatchling survival put the odds at somewhere between 1 and 3 percent reaching adulthood, a figure driven mostly by sand temperature, predation, and the gauntlet of the open ocean, not by how many nests were marked in June. A record season, in other words, is a record amount of activity for the people watching the beach. It isn't a promise about outcomes nobody will ever fully measure.
That activity has to run through a surprisingly small pipeline. More than 150 volunteers participate in the organization, walking assigned sections of beach throughout nesting season, but only 13 certified volunteers are permitted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to mark nests or handle turtles, hatchlings, and eggs. A nest count running roughly 65 percent above the historical June average doesn't come with 65 percent more certified handlers. It comes with the same 13 people covering a season's worth of work compressed into the same short window, which is one reason the group's excavation schedule updates only a few days at a time rather than weeks in advance.
What's actually happening on the sand right now
As of early July, AISTW's leadership expected the first hatchlings to begin emerging within about two weeks, meaning the nests would still be being laid even as earlier ones started to hatch. By early August, that overlap is in full swing. Nests laid in May and June are now moving through their 50 to 60 day incubation windows and beginning to hatch, while excavations, the process of digging into an already-emerged nest to count shells, unhatched eggs, and any hatchlings that didn't make it out on their own, typically continue from mid-July into September. With this year's volume, expect that window to stay busy longer and with more concurrent excavations than a typical August on this island.
If you want to see one, here's what that actually looks like:
- Check the AISTW excavation schedule the same day you plan to go, since dates are posted only a few days ahead and depend on when a nest naturally emerges.
- Bring the beach access number for wherever you're headed. Locations north of Main Beach are marked using access numbers off North Fletcher Ave, and the group's map matches each scheduled dig to a specific access point.
- Show up at the posted time, usually early morning or early evening, and expect a volunteer to narrate what they find as they count shards and unhatched eggs. If any live hatchlings turn up, they're released to the water in front of whoever's there to watch.
There's no guarantee of a live hatchling at any given dig. That's the nature of a process built around counting what's already happened, not staging a show.
What changes on your stretch of sand through October
The practical asks haven't changed from any other year, but a bigger nest count means they matter more, more often, between now and the end of October.
- Turn off outdoor lights facing the beach at night, or close curtains and blinds in ocean-facing rooms. The city of Fernandina Beach actively monitors lighting compliance during nesting season and can be reached through code enforcement for questions.
- Take tents, chairs, and umbrellas off the sand at night. Nassau County's beach ordinance allows patrols to remove anything left on the beach after 8 p.m.
- Fill in any holes you dig before you leave, since a nesting female or a hatchling can become trapped in one.
- Skip the flashlight and the phone light if you're out on the beach after dark. Artificial light is what pulls hatchlings away from the water, not toward it.
None of this is new advice. What's new is the odds that you'll walk past a marked nest, or a small crowd gathered around an excavation, more often than in a typical year, simply because there's more happening on this stretch of sand right now than there has been since 2019.
The real measure of a record season
Nobody will ever publish a clean number for how many of this year's hatchlings actually reached open water and survived. That's not how the biology works, and it's not what AISTW's counts are built to capture. What this season will actually be remembered for, on the ground, is how many quiet, dark nights this island managed to give a genuinely unusual number of nests between now and the last excavation in the fall. That's a smaller, more useful thing to watch for than a headline number, and it's the kind of detail you only notice if you're paying attention to this beach all year, not just during turtle season.
If you love these rhythms of island life as much as we do and want to talk about what it's actually like living here through every season, not just this one, Maria Pinto Malek would love to hear from you. Let's connect.
