You won’t find a gift like this just anywhere!
With the holidays not far away, we wanted to pass along a unique gift idea for friends and loved ones: Adopt a Sea Turtle Nest!
Sea turtle monitoring on Sanibel Island originally began in the late 1950’s, and has been coordinated by the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation since 1992.
As many of you know, more than 100 volunteers help out with the SCCF Sea Turtle Program each year by surveying 18 miles of beach — from the Sanibel Lighthouse to Blind Pass — every morning from April through October. The volunteers are out pre-dawn to search for sea turtles who may have successfully laid eggs the night before. All nests are then watched over until the eggs hatch and there are signs of hatchlings crawling to the Gulf.
While the 2018 nesting counts on Sanibel and Captiva were slightly lower than last year, they were still well above average. As of mid-September, over 33,700 hatchlings had reached the sea from the 721 nests found on the islands (718 loggerhead, 2 green turtles and one Kemp’s ridley). The rare Kemp’s ridley nest was a distinct highlight of the season as it produced 34 hatchlings, even after suffering impacts from Tropical Storm Alberto.
By symbolically “adopting” a nest, you can play an instrumental role in the conservation and research activities of SCCF’s Sea Turtle Program.
The cost of adopting a sea turtle nest is $75 (a tax-free deduction of $58 with a t-shirt, or $75 without one) and includes a certificate at the end of the year reporting the results of your adopted nest. For more information, click here!
