Walk the beach behind Beachwalker Drive most evenings this September and you'll pass a stretch of orange tape staked into the dune, a numbered post, and something new pinned into the sand beneath it: a mesh screen, flush with the surface, easy to miss unless you know to look. A couple of seasons ago that screen wasn't there. This year, it's on almost every nest on the island.
That small piece of hardware is the physical trace of the strangest season Kiawah's beach has had in a long time, and it's tangled up with the best nesting numbers the island has seen in years. Both things are true at once, and neither one explains the other the way you'd expect.
The Number That Doesn't Mean What It Looks Like
By August 6, Kiawah's Turtle Patrol had logged 495 loggerhead nests along the island's ten miles of beach, a count the Post and Courier put at 498 in its own tally that same week. Either number makes 2026 the second-highest season on record, behind only 2019's 574 nests, and more than double the 199 nests counted in all of 2025.
If your instinct is to read that as recovery, a turnaround, a trend line finally bending up, the people who actually walk the beach every morning will tell you it isn't that simple. Loggerheads don't nest every year. A mature female typically lays several clutches in a season, then skips two or three years before coming back to shore at all. Lynne Sager, the permit holder for Kiawah's turtle patrol, has said plainly that the swings in nest counts come from that biological rhythm, not from anything the island did differently between 2025 and 2026. Up the coast, the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge saw the same kind of jump this summer, nearly 3,400 nests against roughly 1,600 the year before, which suggests this was a strong nesting year across the whole stretch of coast, not a Kiawah-specific story.
So the headline number is real, but it's mostly a coincidence of turtle biology lining up with a good year. The more interesting story is what happened alongside it.
A Predator Behavior Nobody Had Ever Recorded
In May, Kiawah's wildlife team documented three attacks on nesting female loggerheads within roughly three weeks, all committed by coyotes. Jim Jordan, the town's wildlife and natural resources director, has been direct about what makes this unusual: coyotes are known to dig up and eat turtle eggs, a natural and well-studied part of the ecosystem, but there was no prior scientific record anywhere of a coyote killing an adult nesting female. Michelle Pate, the sea turtle coordinator at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, called it exactly that, an unusual escalation with no documented precedent.
"In the scientific literature, there are no records of coyotes preying or attacking adult female loggerheads, until now."
The town and DNR responded by trapping and removing two coyotes believed responsible, a step Jordan described as something the island had never had reason to take before. Coyotes have lived on Kiawah since colonizing the island in 2009, and the town's long-standing policy has been to let the population coexist with wildlife rather than manage it aggressively. That policy held even as coyote egg predation crept up, hitting about 7.6 percent of eggs laid in 2023 after years of staying low. What changed the calculus this spring wasn't eggs. It was a mature female, thirty-five years in the making before she's old enough to nest at all, killed on the beach where she'd come to lay.
What's Different About the Nests You'll Pass This Month
That's where the mesh screens come in. Kiawah's turtle patrol first tested metal screening at the end of the 2023 season specifically to block coyotes from digging into nests, and by 2024 the town had moved to screen every single nest on the island as a matter of course. It worked well enough against egg predation that it's now standard equipment, which is why the markers you pass on an evening walk look different than they did a few years ago.
Screens don't stop everything, and they weren't built for the kind of attack that happened in May, which occurs before a nest exists at all. But they're the clearest physical evidence that the island's approach to coyotes has shifted from passive coexistence toward active intervention where it matters most. The patrol still runs the way it has for decades: eight nesting zones covered by truck before sunrise, seven hatching zones walked on foot once nests start to emerge, more than 300 volunteers total, a program the town has funded since 1990 and that traces back to 1973.
Hatchling season isn't over. Officials expect emergence to continue through October, so the marked nests you see now, screens and all, are still active. Only about one hatchling in a thousand survives to adulthood even under ideal conditions, which is part of why the patrol treats every remaining nest as worth protecting through the end of the season.
Lights Out Isn't a Suggestion
If you live on the island, you've likely had the conversation about porch lights and blackout curtains during turtle season. It's not just a courtesy. Kiawah has a standing ordinance in effect from May 1 through October 31 that makes artificial light visible from the beach a code violation, enforceable with fines. The specifics are worth knowing if you haven't looked them up recently:
- No exterior light source may be visible from the beach during the ordinance period.
- Unfiltered lights of any color except red, including flashlights, phone screens, and camera flashes, are prohibited on the beach between 9 p.m. and dawn.
- Violations can be reported to the town's Code Enforcement office at 843-259-2137.
The reasoning is straightforward once you know it. Hatchlings navigate to the water using the natural light reflecting off the surf. A porch light or a phone flashlight can pull them the wrong direction, burning through the limited energy reserve they need to swim the roughly sixty miles to reach the safety of open-water sargassum. With hatchlings still emerging into October, this isn't a rule that lapsed with Labor Day. It's live for another several weeks.
If You Want to Watch It Happen
Kiawah's public beach access runs through Beachwalker County Park at the island's west end, operated by Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission, the only spot on the island open to non-residents without a private accompaniment. Nest inventories, where the patrol excavates a hatched nest three days after emergence and counts the results, happen on a rolling schedule from July through October and are open for the public to observe. The Kiawah Island Conservancy frames the ask to residents and visitors simply, under what it calls its RSVP approach: respect the nests, support the patrol's work, volunteer if you're able, and protect the habitat by filling in holes and keeping the beach dark after dusk.
None of that requires special access or an invitation. It requires paying attention to the same stretch of sand you're probably walking anyway.
The Season in One Sentence
Two things happened on the same beach this year that don't usually happen together. The turtles had their second-best nesting season since anyone started counting, and the coyotes did something that had never once been recorded in the scientific literature. The mesh screens under the sand are the island's answer to the second story, not the first, and they'll still be there long after this year's unusually high nest count fades back into the normal cycle.
If you're watching that beach change season to season, whether it's the turtle patrol's routines or the quieter shifts in how the island itself is evolving, Nick Sells Carolinas is here when you're ready to talk about what's next on Kiawah Island. Start your search, contact Nick today.
