Georgia Loggerheads Set a Nest Record After 2025’s Miss

Georgia loggerheads topped 4,110 nests in 2026, breaking a 37-year record a year after the weakest count since 2022. First crawls were logged on May 5 at St. Catherines Island and Cumberland Island National Seashore.

Mark Dodd, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources sea turtle program coordinator, treats that early-May return as routine. The rest of the summer was the wager: whether 2025’s slump was a skipped nesting beat, not a smaller herd of females.

Two Islands Logged the First Nests in May

DNR confirmed the first nests on St. Catherines and Cumberland on a Tuesday, then posted the season-open note on May 6. St. Catherines is a private barrier island in Liberty County. Cumberland Island National Seashore sits off St. Marys.

Dodd said the Southeast’s loggerheads come ashore around May 1. “It’s like clockwork,” he said. Daily checks on every Georgia beach still wait until mid-May, so those two islands handed the state its first marks before the full patrol net was up.

Those crawls were the first 2026 nests on Georgia beaches, and they did not tell anyone how the summer would score. The models that had called for a surge in 2025 had already missed. Dodd put the uncertainty in one line.

Just when you think we have it figured out, the turtles go do something different.

Mark Dodd, Georgia Sea Turtle Program Coordinator, DNR season-open briefing

The cooperative’s nest database later put the last 2026 nest on Blackbeard Island on Aug. 30 and the last emergence on Jekyll Island on Sept. 23, so the year that started on two quiet beaches ran almost four months.

THE 2026 NESTING CLOCK

1. May 5, 2026: First loggerhead nests confirmed on St. Catherines Island and Cumberland Island National Seashore.
2. Mid-May 2026: Daily patrols begin on all Georgia barrier island beaches.
3. June 16, 2026: Ossabaw Island logs 31 nests in a single night, a local one-day mark.
4. June 22, 2026: The statewide count reaches 2,366 nests, about halfway through laying.
5. July 29, 2026: The count hits 4,080 nests, then climbs past the old record.
6. Aug. 30, 2026: Last nest of the year logged on Blackbeard Island.
7. Sept. 23, 2026: Last hatchling emergence logged on Jekyll Island.

Inventories of hatched nests kept going after those dates, which is why DNR still talks about the 4,110 figure as a record that was already in hand, not a sealed year-end ledger.

The Three-Year Cycle Missed 2025

Statewide counts that began in 1989 had settled into a rough three-year wave of high, middle, and low summers. 2022 set the prior high at 4,071 nests. 2023 held at 3,431. 2024 slipped to 2,490, under the 2,800-nest recovery mark in the federal plan.

2025 was supposed to be the next busy year, the third summer after 2022. It was not. DNR’s table lists 1,879 loggerhead nests, the fewest since that 2022 peak. Females that should have been on the beach were still out feeding.

GEORGIA LOGGERHEAD NEST TOTALS

The four-year slide from 4,071 to 1,879 is what made 2026 feel like a bet instead of a routine up-year. If the missed peak had been a real drop in adult females, the next summer would not have thrown a record. It did.

Why Loggerhead Counts Swing So Hard

A female loggerhead does not nest every year. She has to pack on enough crabs and other invertebrates to haul a 300-pound body onto the sand and lay several clutches. Dodd has said a poor feeding year can make her wait. That delay is why a “clockwork” May start can still produce a wild summer total.

On Georgia beaches the wait has tended to cluster. Groups of females come in together, then stay out together, which is why the state table reads as a three-year pulse more than a smooth climb. 2025 broke that clustering. The cohort that models treated as due simply did not show.

Dodd’s other long number sits under the swings. Nest counts have risen about 4 percent a year since the early 1990s, even with the troughs. Turtle excluder devices in shrimp nets, required from the late 1980s, cut a major source of drowning. Dawn patrols, nest screens, and lighting rules cut the losses on the beach. The 4 percent is the trend. The three-year wave is the noise that fooled people in 2025.

By June, the missed cohort was on the sand at once. Dodd described stronger pulses of females in a single night, synced about every 12 to 13 days. Ossabaw’s 31-nest night on June 16 was followed two days later by only eight crawls on the same island. The up-and-down days hid how large the year already was.

4,110 Nests Broke a 37-Year Mark

At the halfway point the cooperative had 2,366 nests by June 22, and the running total had already climbed past 2,800. Citing that first-half pace, Dodd said he expected about 4,700 nests by the end of laying, which would have smashed the 1989-era ceiling.

The sure number arrived sooner than that forecast. Cooperative reports put the count at 4,080 on the morning of July 29. DNR then said the total had topped 4,110 nests, the most since statewide surveys expanded to every barrier island in 1989. The old mark was 4,071 in 2022. In the last five summers the record has now fallen twice, and the 2,800-nest recovery goal has been cleared in 2022, 2023, and 2026.

That 4,110 figure is an early-August snapshot, not a locked final, because females were still nesting into late August. It was already enough. 4,110 is more than double 2025’s 1,879, and it sat 39 nests above the 2022 high when DNR called the record. The 4,700 projection can wait for a closed ledger. The rebound bet did not have to.

Adult females on these beaches run more than 3 feet long and top 300 pounds. They crawl up at night, dig at the dune line, and bury a clutch of about 100 eggs. Cooperative crews walk the same beaches at dawn, mark the tracks, and screen the nests. The record is their tally of those screened pits, not a guess from boats.

Cumberland Island Took the Largest Share

The load is not spread evenly. Cumberland Island National Seashore again carried the heaviest share, with more than 1,200 loggerhead nests in the cooperative’s beach-by-beach nesting updates. Ossabaw, St. Catherines, Blackbeard, Wassaw, and Sapelo took much of the rest. Developed strands such as Jekyll and Tybee posted smaller counts and higher rates of nest moves away from tides and lights.

About 200 volunteers, researchers, and agency staff work the coast under a DNR permit. They also handle the rare green turtle and Kemp’s ridley nests that show up in Georgia. One egg comes out of each nest for University of Georgia genetic work that names the mother. Over the last decade that sampling has pointed to 500 to about 1,000 distinct females using Georgia each year.

HOW A GEORGIA NEST GETS ON THE BOOKS

• Dawn tracks: Crews walk the beach at first light and read crawl marks before the tide erases them.
• One egg: A single egg, less than 1 percent of a typical clutch, goes to UGA for the mother’s DNA.
• Wire screen: A predator cover goes over the pit to keep hogs, coyotes, raccoons, and armadillos out.
• Hatch check: After emergence, crews inventory shells, dead hatchlings, and unhatched eggs.

St. Catherines, which shared the May 5 opener, is run by a private foundation. Cumberland is federal park land. Most of the record was built on islands the public never drives, which is why a state-high count can still feel invisible from a packed weekend beach.

The 2004 Collapse Still Limits Growth

Loggerheads are listed as threatened since 1978 under the Endangered Species Act. Females do not nest until they are 30 to 35 years old, so a bad hatch year shows up on the beach a generation later. Georgia’s worst modern count was 358 nests in 2004. Those missing hatchlings are the adults that are not nesting now.

A model built by DNR, the University of Georgia, and the U.S. Geological Survey says the regional population will plateau at current levels for more than a decade because of that early-2000s hole. If the protections stay in place, the same model says numbers can rise again after that, toward totals last seen in the late 1950s. Dodd, in August, put a shorter clock on the recovery goal itself: another 10 years, on current trends.

The 2026 record does not wipe that lag. It shows the females that did recruit are laying, and that the beach program is still finding almost every nest. Dodd has said the crews started out averaging about 850 nests a year. The 1989 baseline in the DNR table is 675. Either way, 4,110 is a different coast from the one that made biologists talk about losing loggerheads after 2004.

The remaining kills are smaller and closer to shore. Of the 72 sea turtles found dead or hurt in Georgia in 2025, 24 percent of those that could be assessed had injuries consistent with a boat strike. Lights on developed beaches still pull hatchlings inland. Plastic bags still get eaten. The record year does not retire those calls to 800-272-8363.

Warm Sand Leaves Males Harder to Find

Hatch season is when the next problem shows up in a shovel of sand. Nest temperature sets sex in loggerheads, with hotter pits yielding more females. Dodd spent July on islands such as Sapelo, which held about 300 nests, clipping a bit of fin from dead hatchlings and bagging egg remains for a new nuclear-DNA test at UGA.

The work is Georgia’s first real attempt to count fathers. After leaving the beach as hatchlings, males largely vanish from the datasets that have tracked mothers for years. Brian Shamblin, a University of Georgia senior research scientist, is pulling sperm DNA from yolks to see how many males even tried to fertilize a clutch, then matching flipper tissue to the male that won.

The big concern is are we producing enough males?

Mark Dodd, Georgia Sea Turtle Program Coordinator, on Sapelo Island, July 27, 2026

Dodd put the stakes in a second line: the recovery only holds if enough males are around to mate. Shamblin said the new method is finally efficient enough to ask where those meetings happen, and that it will take years to draw a coherent picture. Florida still hosts the bulk of U.S. loggerhead nesting, so Georgia’s 4,110 is a state survey record, not a claim that this coast now leads the species. The local talk treated the milestone as good news and moved on. The lab work in Athens is the part that cannot move on.

Georgia’s sea turtle nesting season is over for laying. Cooperators are still opening hatched nests and sending tissue inland. The 2026 females are back at sea, and the next May clock will start whether the male counts are ready or not.

Frequently Asked Questions

When Is Sea Turtle Nesting Season in Georgia?

Female loggerheads nest from about May through mid-August on Georgia barrier islands. Eggs hatch in 55 to 65 days, so hatchlings keep coming out into September, which is why patrols and nest inventories run well after the last crawl.

How Many Eggs Are in a Loggerhead Nest?

DNR puts a typical clutch at about 100 eggs the size of ping-pong balls. Crews take one egg for genetic work, which is less than 1 percent of that clutch, then screen the rest against hogs, coyotes, and raccoons.

Are Georgia Loggerheads Endangered or Threatened?

The federal listing has been threatened since 1978. Georgia DNR reclassified loggerheads as endangered at the state level in 2006, a stricter local status that sits on top of the federal one and shapes how nests are handled on state-managed beaches.

What Should a Boater Do After Hitting a Sea Turtle?

DNR tells boaters to stand by and call 800-272-8363 right away. Anglers who hook a turtle should land it with a net, leave the hook in place, keep it out of direct sun, and cover it with a damp towel; do not lift the animal by the line.

Where Do Georgia Loggerhead Hatchlings Go After They Hit the Water?

DNR says the young can move from sargassum weed off Georgia into a current-powered loop that circles to the Azores and the eastern Atlantic, then south to West Africa and back to the western Atlantic, a trip that lasts years before any female returns to nest.

Cooperators are still bagging shells and dead hatchlings for the Athens lab. The females that built the 4,110-nest mark are already offshore. Next May they will not all come back, and that skip is now a known feature, not a scare.