Alabama's Gulf Coast just wrapped up its official sea turtle patrol season, and the headlines are calling 2026 a strong year. Eighty-nine confirmed nests, according to Share the Beach, the Alabama Coastal Foundation's turtle conservation program that walks all 47 miles of the state's shoreline every morning during nesting season. Strong compared to what, though, is the question nobody in those headlines bothered to answer.
If you live at Waterways and have spent any part of this summer walking the beach at Gulf State Park or catching a sunset near the pier, you've probably noticed the roped-off patches of sand with the orange stakes and the laminated signs. You may have also noticed that as of this week, the daily morning patrols that put those stakes in the ground have already stopped. That doesn't mean the season is over. It means you're now in the quieter half of it, the part nobody writes press releases about.
What "Patrols Ended" Actually Means Right Now
Here's the piece of timing most coverage skips past. Share the Beach volunteers patrol the coastline every morning from May 1 through August 31, looking for the telltale crawl marks a nesting female leaves in the sand. That search window closed three weeks ago. What continues through October 31 is the second half of the job: monitoring the nests that are already in the ground, waiting out the incubation period, and being present when hatchlings finally dig their way to the surface.
That distinction matters if you're a Waterways homeowner deciding whether outdoor lighting still needs attention this month. It does. A nest laid in early August has an incubation window of roughly 50 to 75 days, according to the Alabama Coastal Foundation's own nesting data, which puts hatch dates for some of this year's later nests squarely in early to mid October. The searching is done. The waiting, and the risk that comes with waiting, is not.
Four Seasons, Four Very Different Numbers
The "strong season" framing gets more complicated once you look at it against recent history instead of on its own.
| Season | Confirmed Nests |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 143 |
| 2024 | 78 |
| 2025 | 96 |
| 2026 | 89 (through August) |
Eighty-nine nests is a real recovery from the 78 counted in 2024, the lowest year in this stretch. But it's also fewer than last year's 96, and it's not close to the 143 nests Alabama's beaches produced in 2023. Calling 2026 strong only holds up if the comparison point is the worst year on the list. Set against the last four seasons as a group, 89 lands somewhere in the middle, closer to average than to remarkable.
None of this is bad news exactly. Loggerhead sea turtles, which account for the overwhelming majority of nests on Alabama beaches, are federally listed as threatened, and year to year swings of this size are normal for a population still working its way back from decades of habitat loss and, more recently, the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Some of the program's funding for exactly this kind of long term monitoring still comes from Deepwater Horizon natural resource damage settlement dollars, a detail that says something about how long this recovery has been underway. But precision matters more than optimism here, and 89 nests is a number worth understanding on its own terms rather than accepting the adjective attached to it.
The Math That Doesn't Make It Onto the Beach Signs
The species breakdown for 2026 is about what you'd expect for this stretch of coast. As of August, Share the Beach had documented 85 loggerhead nests, two Kemp's ridley nests, and two green turtle nests. Loggerheads dominate here the way they dominate every season on the Alabama coast, and green turtle nests, while still rare, have shown up with slightly more regularity in recent years than they used to.
What's harder to see from the beach is what happens to a nest after it's staked off. Each female lays somewhere between 80 and 120 eggs. Under natural conditions, and even with the screens Share the Beach volunteers place over active nests to keep out raccoons, coyotes, and foxes, the survival math is brutal. Chandra Wright, who heads the East Beach division of Share the Beach, put the odds plainly earlier this year when nesting season began.
"The hatchlings are just so stinking cute, so who doesn't love a baby sea turtle."
The odds she was describing alongside that quote are steep: when a nest isn't found, marked, and protected, as few as one in 1,000 hatchlings makes it to adulthood. Protection doesn't change the long odds of survival in the open Gulf, but it does remove the preventable threats between the nest and the water, which is where artificial light becomes the whole ballgame.
Hatchlings navigate by finding the brightest, lowest point on the horizon, which on a natural beach at night is moonlight reflecting off the Gulf. Porch lights, dock lighting, and even a phone flashlight can outcompete that signal and send a nest's worth of hatchlings crawling the wrong direction, toward roads, pools, or predators, instead of the water. This is the actual reason Share the Beach and the cities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach ask residents to keep exterior lighting shielded or off through the end of October, and it's a request with real teeth behind it. Disturbing a nest or a nesting turtle carries federal penalties under the Endangered Species Act that can run up to $15,000 per offense.
What's Still Worth Doing Before Halloween
For anyone at Waterways who spends evenings near the water this time of year, whether that's a walk on the beach or an evening on the dock, a few things are still active and worth knowing before the season fully closes out at the end of October.
- If you spot fresh tracks in the sand that look, in Wright's words, like lasagna noodles, or come across a nest that hasn't been staked yet, call the sea turtle hotline at 1-866-SEA-TURTLE (866-732-8878).
- Keep exterior lights facing the beach shielded or off after dark through the end of the month. This applies most directly to beachfront and near-beach properties, but the habit is worth carrying home even for those a short drive inland.
- If you want to see a hatch in person, patience matters more than timing. Volunteers can't predict the exact night a nest will go, and the program asks the public to keep distance and skip flash photography if you're lucky enough to be there when it happens.
- Nest adoptions through the Alabama Coastal Foundation at joinacf.org fund the volunteer hours that make this kind of monitoring possible for the rest of the season and into next year's kickoff.
Share the Beach traces its roots back to 2005, started through the Friends of the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge before the Alabama Coastal Foundation took over program oversight. Twenty years in, the volunteers who still walk this coastline every morning from May through August, and keep watching nests through Halloween, are the reason any of this data exists at all. That's worth remembering the next time a headline calls a season strong without asking strong compared to what.
Living inside a gated community built around water changes how you notice these things. At Waterways of the Gulf Shore, the marina and canal system are the daily backdrop, but the Gulf itself, and everything nesting on it this time of year, is still close enough to matter. If you're curious what else is happening around the community this fall, or you're weighing what waterfront ownership here actually looks like day to day, reach out to schedule a consultation with our team.
