Walk the beach access at 8th Street West after dinner this month and you'll still see the staked orange tape, the hand-lettered "Do Not Disturb" signs pressed into the sand above the tide line. Most summers, that's the whole story: a marked nest, a quiet stretch of dune, a countdown running somewhere underground. This August, if you've lived here long enough to notice, something is different. There are gaps where markers used to be. Whole sections of beach that had four or five staked nests in June now have one, or none.
That gap has a name: Tropical Storm Bertha, which brought nearly three feet of storm surge to St. George Island's beaches in late July, according to a local news report on the storm's toll. The storm arrived in the middle of what had been shaping up as one of the strongest nesting years this island has tracked in recent memory. Statewide, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had already counted more than 94,000 loggerhead nests by June 30, a pace that put 2026 within reach of the state record, according to a wire report on the season. Here on St. George Island, the season had opened in a rainstorm back in mid-May, when volunteers found the year's first nest during a Tuesday downpour, a few days later than usual but no less welcome.
Then Bertha erased more than half of it in a matter of days.
The Numbers Before and After Bertha
The St. George Island Sea Turtle Patrol, the volunteer group that walks the beach at dawn every day from May through October marking and monitoring nests, has been tracking the damage in real time. The numbers moved fast enough that three separate local news updates in ten days each told a slightly different piece of the same story.
| Point in the season | Nest count | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-July, before Bertha | 351 total (344 loggerhead, 7 green) | Season tracking toward a strong year |
| July 21-24, during and after the storm | 214 nests affected | Roughly three feet of storm surge washes over the beach |
| July 27 update | 142 washed away, 72 inundated, just under 130 left | Patrol finishes its post-storm survey |
| July 30 update | 24 new nests | Turtles keep coming ashore anyway |
Put plainly, the island lost close to 60 percent of its 2026 nests in a single storm event, based on the Patrol's July 27 accounting. Nine nests had already hatched successfully before Bertha arrived. Everything else was either gone or sitting in standing water long enough to threaten the eggs inside, since sea turtle eggs need oxygen and won't survive submersion.
Sharon Hutchinson, the Patrol's vice president, put it in terms that stick with you if you've walked that stretch of beach yourself. Describing the mile she personally monitors, she told WMBB:
"We lost over 200 of those nest in the mile that I take care of."
That's not an abstraction about a species. That's one person's section of beach, cut nearly in half overnight.
Why the Turtles Didn't Stop
Here's the part that surprised even the volunteers who've done this for years. Within days of the storm, turtles were back on the beach laying new nests. Ten showed up over that first weekend alone. By July 30, the Patrol counted 24 new nests since Bertha, a number president Kimberly Crossen and her team were treating as genuinely good news rather than a footnote.
The mechanism behind that isn't mysterious once you know it. A single female loggerhead doesn't lay one clutch and disappear for the season. She'll typically nest several times across the same summer, spacing her clutches out over weeks specifically because it improves the odds that at least some of them survive whatever the season throws at the beach, whether that's a ghost crab, a raccoon, or a tropical storm. The mothers who were mid-cycle when Bertha hit didn't pack up and leave. They kept doing what the species has done for longer than there have been barrier islands to do it on.
That's the piece of this story that a lot of coverage skips past. The headline number, 214 nests gone, sounds like a season-ending disaster. The follow-up number, 24 and counting, tells you the season didn't end. It split into two populations: the nests that didn't make it, and a newer, smaller cohort that's now incubating on a beach with a lot less company than it had in June.
What That Means for the Next Ten Weeks
Sea turtle eggs on this stretch of coast typically incubate for somewhere between six and nine weeks before hatchlings emerge, which means nests laid in early August won't finish their business until sometime in September or October. That's true every year. What's different this year is the math. With roughly 130 surviving original nests plus a growing number of storm-season replacements, every successful hatch carries more weight toward the island's total than it would in a bumper year with 350-plus nests spreading the risk.
That's the argument for taking the basics seriously through the rest of the season, not because the rules changed, but because the stakes per nest went up. Franklin County has required turtle-friendly lighting on beachfront properties since 1998, most recently codified as Ordinance 2015-1, and a separate Leave No Trace ordinance (14-1) since 2014 keeps the sand clear of tents, chairs, and holes overnight. The Patrol's shorthand for all of it is three words: clean, flat, dark.
- Dark: shielded, low, amber-toned lighting only, and blinds drawn after sunset if your house or rental faces the Gulf. White light from a porch or a pool disorients both nesting females and hatchlings, which will crawl toward the brightest light source instead of the water.
- Flat: knock down sandcastles and fill in holes before you leave the beach each evening. A hatchling that falls into a knee-deep hole rarely gets back out on its own.
- Clean: take chairs, coolers, and canopies off the sand overnight. They're the kind of obstacle that can block a nesting mother's path back to the surf or trap a hatchling headed the other direction.
None of that is new information if you've lived here more than a season. What's new is the reason it matters a little more in August 2026 than it did in a normal year.
A New Kind of Classroom on the Island
The Patrol picked up a second identity this year alongside the storm recovery. Earlier in the season, they re-branded as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a change that gives them more room to expand outreach beyond beach patrols. One result showed up at Franklin County Elementary School, where students in pre-K through fourth grade were asked to name a satellite-tagged turtle the Patrol would be following. They chose Shelly. When students return to class later this month, they'll get to track her movements after she leaves the Forgotten Coast, a small but concrete way for kids who grew up here to stay connected to a season that just tested the adults who run it.
It's a fitting bookend to a summer that started with volunteers celebrating a nest found in a downpour and is now closing out with a rebuilding population and a school full of elementary students rooting for one turtle by name.
If you want to spend an evening on the dark side of that lights-out habit rather than fighting it, the Cape St. George Light is hosting its August Sunset and Full Moon Climb on Friday, August 28, from 8 to 10 p.m. Ninety-two wooden stairs and a metal ladder get you to a lantern room view of the same Gulf the hatchlings are swimming into this month, under exactly the kind of low, warm light the beach needs right now.
We live here too, which means we notice the same gaps in the beach markers you do, and we care about the same nesting season for reasons that have nothing to do with a listing. If you're weighing a move to St. George Island or just want to talk shop about what's happening on this stretch of coast, The Burkett Team is always glad to talk story before we ever talk square footage.
