ANNA MARIA ISLAND – Tropical Storm Elsa washed over the Island on July 6 and 7, taking some shorebird eggs and chicks with it, and soaking some sea turtle nests in the sand, perhaps for too long.
But Suzi Fox, director of Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch and Shorebird Monitoring, remains optimistic.
The first sea turtle nest of the season hatched last week, producing 77 hatchlings.
“Water came up over many nests,” she said. “Are we upset about it? No, it’s nature. Many of those nests will still hatch. Turtles and birds have been at this a lot longer than we have.”
Each June or July, a storm hits the Island, but nesting always resumes and sometimes picks up speed, she said.
With the recent beach renourishment, “Manatee County has done everything they could to have the best nesting beach in Florida,” Fox said. “We’re still going to get washovers. That’s why sea turtles nest up to three times a season.”
While about 25% of sea turtle nests on the Island were lost last week, “The girls are continuing to nest,” she said, including a rare green turtle that nested July 9, only the third green turtle so far this nesting season, which began on May 1. The rest of the turtle nests on the Island are loggerhead sea turtles.
Among the shorebirds, only least terns are nesting this year – no black skimmers, Fox said.
The storm surge on the Gulf of Mexico beaches inundated the least tern colony, she said. While all 120 bird parents survived, only two of 15 chicks survived.
“Now that the water has receded, the adults are back on new eggs,” she said, adding that five newly-hatched chicks have been documented since the storm.
Volunteers do the counting and nest identification, but numbers of volunteers are down from more than 100 to about 20 due to COVID-19, which caused Fox to decide last year to have a few volunteers use ATVs to monitor nests rather than have dozens walk sections of the beach, risking contact with curious beachgoers.
On an ATV, “They can find 20 nests in one day,” she said. “On a day of walking, they can find maybe one.”
Turtle nesting season ends Oct. 31. Bird nesting season is active through the end of August.
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