Sout Carolina Sea Turtles-DeBordieu near Pawleys Island

SC. South Carolina United Turtle Enthusiast, or SCUTE, operates a very active and successful sea turtle protection program on DeBordieu’s six miles of secluded beach. Guests may participate in actions that make the beach safe for turtles coming ashore, morning beach patrols, nest inventories and witness sea turtles being released. 

Volunteers walk at sunrise during nesting season looking for the large turtle tracks leading from the ocean to the dunes and back. When tracks are found, clues are used to determine the nest area. Using pool cues, volunteers probe the sand to locate the soft area of the egg chamber. An average nest of 120 ping pong size eggs may need to be moved if the clutch is laid in an unsafe place such as below the spring tide line or in a high foot traffic area. Nests are protected with a plastic mesh, staked to protect it from predators and a sign is posted with the nesting date.

At about 50 days of incubation, volunteers begin to look for a depression in the nest indicating hatching activity beneath. When a nest hatches, usually at about 55-60 days, hatchlings make a mad dash to the ocean following the fluorescence of the waves as long as they are not lead astray by onshore lighting. After a hatch, SCDNR requires us to wait 3 nights before conducting the nest inventory so as to give all hatchlings a chance to exit the nest. Inventory date, time and location are posted on the website. At the inventory, a volunteer tells visitors about the procedure and printed information is handed out. The nest contents are dug out and data is recorded and sent to SCDNR. Sometimes live hatchlings are found in the nest that were not able to emerge on their own. Volunteers put the hatchlings on the beach, let them crawl to the ocean and ‘imprint’. At maturity, 25-30 years, female loggerheads will generally return to the beach of their birth to nest. However, recentDNAstudies show some turtles will nest many miles from where they hatched.
DeBordieu Real Estate generously sponsors DeBordieu & Hobcaw S.C.U.T.E. and provides us with this website. Here, you can keep up with daily nesting/hatching activity, find links and references, learn about the SC Aquarium's SeaTurtle Hospital, etc.
The DeBordieu Colony Real Estate office supports the local SCUTE program through charitable contributions. Some of the funds were used to adopt a North Carolina sea turtle by the name of Point. She has a satellite tracking device attached to her shell. She is the first documented turtle to trek from North Carolina to the gulf coast. You can view her journey at the following website. http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/index....
DeBordieu Turtle Updates