News Release

Wildlife Nesting on Record Pace at Cape Lookout National Seashore

Date: June 24, 2019
Contact: B.G. Horvat, 252-838-8906

HARKERS ISLAND, NC – – If you take a trip to Cape Lookout National Seashore, you will notice all of the temporary beach closures. Currently, there are 19 out of 47 miles of beach closed to motor vehicles due to wildlife, from nesting birds to sea turtles. 28 miles of beach, and 40 miles of backroad remain open to vehicles.

So far, there have been over 112 shorebird nests, consisting of Piping Plovers, American Oystercatchers, and a multitude of terns and black skimmers. According to park resource managers, Hurricane Florence improved the nesting habitat for shorebirds by flattening the dune line, creating a large sand flats devoid of vegetation. This change allows the nesting birds to see would-be predators from a distance and the parental birds can confuse and redirect the predator away from the nest. Therefore, more bird nests survive to hatch and produce chicks that take anywhere from 25 to 45 days to fledge until they take flight.

Meanwhile, there are a record-setting number of sea turtle nests, 217. Loggerhead and Green sea turtles account for these nests that add up to more nests than the total Cape Lookout had for all of the 2018 season. The sea turtles started early and strong in the month of May. Resource rangers began looking for nests on May 1, and conduct daily patrols until September 15. The first nest was discovered on May 4. By the end of the month, there were already 82 nests compared to only 10 nests in May of 2018. In fact, the average number of nests in the month of May, from 1990 to 2017 is 7.7 nests.
  
“Our dedicated biological monitoring staff have been overwhelmed with monitoring and managing this upsurge in beach wildlife, but are excited that this will be one for the record books at Cape Lookout” says Jon Altman, Resource Management Supervisor at Cape Lookout National Seashore, “I would also like to thank Cape Lookout National Seashore visitors for their cooperation in respecting the temporary wildlife closures.”
For current information on the beach closures at Cape Lookout National Seashore, go to: https://www.nps.gov/calo/planyourvisit/wildlife-closures.htm, or contact the park’s information desk at 252-728-2250, extension ‘0’.