Strolling along the beach at Fort De Soto Park on a summer morning, tiny footprints in the sand tell a story.
"You can see where the hatchling came out of the nest and made a mad dash for the water," explains park supervisor Jim Wilson. "A few lucky ones make it. But baby sea turtles are pretty low on the food chain. When they hatch, they have a lot of things after them."
Wilson, who is lucky enough to actually live on America's number one beach, looks forward to summer and sea turtle nesting season.
"It is the one time of year when I get to play fairy godmother," says Wilson, who oversees the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area's most popular park. "This is a magical time for us."
In a typical year, more than 150 loggerhead sea turtles successfully nest on St. Petersburg/Clearwater area beaches, and of those, more than a third will be found on six miles of undeveloped shoreline in Wilson 's backyard.
Loggerheads are one of five species of endangered sea turtles that lay their eggs on Florida's beaches. While the green, leatherback, hawksbill and Kemp's Ridley can be found in local waters, the loggerhead is by far the most common.
Peak nesting time runs May through August. On a typical summer day, Wilson starts early and surveys the beach looking for the telltale sign of a nesting loggerhead.
"There is no mistaking where a sea turtle has been," Wilson explains. "They clear the sand around in a big circle, and in some cases, they are still there the next morning."
The beach at Fort De Soto, like many other county parks, is closed to the public at night to protect nesting turtles.
"You have to remember that these animals spend their whole lives in the ocean and only come up on land, a foreign environment, to lay their eggs," says Wilson. "They are very vulnerable. We see a lot of false crawls." (A false crawl is when a sea turtle comes out of the water to nest and, for some reason, turns around and heads back to sea.)
"It could be because they saw a raccoon or a night heron and got spooked," Wilson explains. "So you could imagine what would happen if they came up to nest and spotted a bunch of noisy humans hanging around."
The typical sea turtle has 75 to 150 eggs. About 60 days after a turtle lay its eggs, hatchlings scramble from the nest and instinctively head toward the water.
"We come in about 72 hours after the eggs hatch and survey the nest" says Wilson. "Hopefully we find nothing but broken shells. But occasionally we find some that didn't hatch or live hatchlings that didn't make it out of the nest. That is where the public comes in."
The park maintains a "call list" of volunteers and interested parties who want to witness the release of the baby turtles that have been "rescued" from a nest.
"Baby sea turtles are pretty vulnerable," he said. "Birds, ghost crabs, fish... they are on everybody's menu. Only a handful of the original 100 or so will actually make it to maturity."
Sea turtles have more than just sharks to worry about. Another enemy is man. Thousands of these reptiles are also killed each year in commercial fishing nets. Many turtles die when they eat plastic bags they mistake for a favorite food, jellyfish.
Human interference on nesting beaches is also a problem in many of the more developed beach communities. Turtles are known to stop midway through the nesting process if humans appear. And hatchlings can also become disoriented by streetlights and walk into roads.
That is why an undeveloped area such as Fort De Soto is so important to the survival of the species. In the more densely populated areas of the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area, beach residents are encouraged to keep their outdoor lights off during the nesting season, May through August, to avoid confusing a hatchling in search of the sea.
It is possible to come across a nesting loggerhead at night; the odds are about the same as seeing a shooting star. If so, keep your distance and do not disturb the turtle.
