Sea Turtle Nesting Season Opens, and the Lights-Out Rules Come With It

Loggerhead sea turtles come ashore on Hilton Head Island between May and October, and for six months the island rearranges itself around them.

What the ordinance actually requires

The Town's lighting ordinance runs May 1 to October 31. If a building is visible from the beach, exterior lights have to be off by 10 p.m. or shielded and aimed downward, and interior lights visible from the sand mean closing the blinds at 10 p.m. Rental guests are the usual offenders, mostly because nobody told them. If you are staying oceanfront in Palmetto Dunes, Sea Pines or the Forest Beach area, work out which of your lights throw onto the dune line on your first afternoon rather than on your third night.

Three other rules carry the same weight and apply to day visitors too:

• Fill in any hole deeper than about a foot before you leave.
• Take tents, chairs, umbrellas and toys off the beach overnight.
• Leave nothing behind, including the plastic shovel.

A nesting female that meets a chair leg or a trench often turns around and goes back to the water without laying. A hatchling that drops into an unfilled hole usually does not get out of it.

Who is on the sand at dawn

Sea Turtle Patrol Hilton Head Island walks the beach every morning from May 1 until the last nest finishes hatching, working under a permit from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Volunteers read the previous night's crawls, mark nests with poles and tape, and relocate the ones laid below the high-tide line. The island has averaged somewhere in the region of 250 nests a season; strong years have run well above that.

If you find a marked nest, give it a wide berth. If you find an unmarked crawl — two parallel tractor-tread tracks coming out of the surf and going back in — leave it alone and report it rather than following the tracks up the beach.

Watching without interfering

There is no reliable public schedule of nest excavations, and anyone promising a guaranteed hatchling sighting is selling something. Nests hatch at night, on their own timetable. No white flashlights, no phone torches, no flash photography. A red-filtered light is the accepted compromise for walking the beach after dark in season.