In early August, under a gray sky that kept the beach mostly empty, a nest of sea turtle hatchlings on Topsail Island came up disoriented. Instead of crawling toward the surf, they scattered. Topsail Turtle Project volunteers moved in, guided the whole clutch by hand toward the water, and got every one of them into the ocean. It was the kind of quiet, unremarkable-looking rescue that happens most summers on this beach and rarely makes the news.
This year it did, because this year is different. By mid-July, volunteers patrolling the island's 26 miles of coastline had already logged 100 sea turtle nests. That number alone topped the entire 2025 season, which finished with 91 nests for the whole year, front to back. And nesting season on Topsail Island doesn't close until October 31. The record was set with roughly a third of the calendar still open.
If you live here, you already knew turtles nest on this beach. What you may not have clocked yet is how unusual this particular season is, and why that unusualness is exactly why volunteers were out at dawn earlier this month walking a nest of hatchlings to the water by hand.
A Record Set With the Season Still Running
The 100-nest mark came with a bonus for anyone who tracks this closely: the season's first green sea turtle nest, found among the recent finds. Loggerheads dominate the nesting here, so a green sea turtle nest is a rarer sighting, a sign that more than one species is using this stretch of beach to reproduce.
Every one of those nests exists because someone walked the beach and found it. The Topsail Turtle Project, the volunteer arm of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, surveys the full 26 miles each morning during nesting season looking for the tracks a nesting female leaves behind. That's Topsail Beach, Surf City, and North Topsail Beach covered on foot, every day, from May through the fall, by people who are mostly unpaid.
A female loggerhead typically nests three to five times in a season, dropping around 120 eggs each visit. That means the 100-nest count isn't necessarily 100 different mothers. It's still, by any measure, an early and heavy year.
Why More Nests Means More Nights Like That One
Here's the mechanism behind the story that opened this piece. Sea turtle eggs take about 60 days to incubate. A nest laid in early June is hatching right around now, in late August. A nest laid at the height of the summer surge that pushed the count past 100 is hatching or about to.
A bigger nest count earlier in the season means more hatching events stacked into August and September, precisely the stretch when Topsail Beach still has porch lights on, beach chairs left out overnight, and holes dug earlier that afternoon still sitting in the sand. Hatchlings navigate to the water using light. Under natural conditions, that means moving toward the brighter horizon over the ocean. Streetlights, porch lights, and lit windows can pull them the wrong way entirely, which is what appears to have happened to the nest that came up disoriented earlier this month.
More nests this year simply means more chances for that exact scenario to play out on more nights than usual, right through the rest of hatching season.
If you see hatchlings crawling the wrong way, or a mother turtle on the beach struggling to nest, don't approach and don't touch. Touching a nest or a hatchling, even one that looks stuck or headed the wrong direction, is against federal law. Call the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center's hotline at 910-329-0222, option 3. Trained volunteers, operating under the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission's ES Permit 26ST05, are the ones authorized to intervene.
That last point is worth sitting with. The same law that keeps a well-meaning resident from picking up a struggling hatchling is what allowed permitted volunteers to walk in and guide that entire nest safely to the water earlier this month. The fix isn't to do nothing. It's to call the people who are allowed to act.
What Actually Helps, According to the People Walking the Beach Every Morning
The habits that matter most this time of year are small and mostly about what residents remove from the beach, not what they add:
- Turn off porch and pool lights that face the water at night, or switch to turtle-friendly amber bulbs
- Close blinds or curtains on ocean-facing windows after dark during nesting and hatching season
- Fill in any holes dug during the day before leaving the beach
- Flatten sandcastles and remove beach gear, tents, and chairs overnight
- Keep a respectful distance from any marked or taped nest
None of this is new to anyone who has spent a full season on this island. What's worth updating this year is the sense of how often it matters. With more nests hatching earlier and more overlapping with peak tourist lighting, the margin for a habit slipping for one night is smaller than usual.
Where to Watch and Learn Before the Public Programs Wrap for the Year
The Topsail Turtle Project runs free public talks called Turtle Talks through the end of this month. Monday mornings at 9 a.m., volunteers meet behind the Assembly Building right in Topsail Beach. Tuesday mornings, the same 9 a.m. slot moves to Soundside Park in Surf City or Town Hall in North Topsail Beach. The programs are free, donation-based, and run through August 31, which means there are only a handful of sessions left this season for anyone who hasn't made it out yet.
There's also a quieter ritual worth knowing about if you walk the beach in the early mornings. Three days after a nest hatches, volunteers return to excavate it, counting hatched eggs, checking for any unhatched ones, and releasing any hatchlings still inside. If you ever come across a small group crouched around a marked nest with clipboards a few days after a known hatch, that's what's happening. It's part of how the Topsail Turtle Project has documented more than 2,600 nests over the life of the program.
The First Full Season Without the Woman Who Started It
There's a detail behind this year's numbers that gives them a different weight for anyone who has been part of this community for a while. Jean Beasley, who took over what her daughter Karen started as a teenager and turned it into North Carolina's only sea turtle rehabilitation center, died in December 2025 at the age of 90. Kathy Zagzebski has led the organization since 2021, but this is the first nesting season to run its full course since Jean's passing.
That the island is having its biggest recorded season in the middle of that transition isn't something the volunteers set out to engineer. It's simply what's happening on the beach this year, and for a program built almost entirely on the discipline of walking the same 26 miles every single morning, it feels like the right kind of continuity.
What's Still Ahead
Nesting season runs through the end of October, and with the nest count already past last year's full total, the back half of this season likely means more hatching events stacked through September and into fall, not fewer. If early August's disoriented nest was a preview, it's a good bet it won't be the only one before the season closes.
Keep the porch lights off, keep the hotline number handy, and if you happen to walk past a marked nest with a small crowd of clipboard-carrying volunteers some morning in the weeks ahead, you'll know exactly what you're looking at.
Matt Berglund has spent years learning the rhythms of this stretch of coast, from turtle season to the housing seasons that follow it. If you're ever curious what a particular corner of Topsail Beach is worth, or you need a local, hands-on read on a property here while you're away, Matthew Berglund is happy to schedule a local market and project consultation whenever you're ready.
