ORANGE BEACH, AL – As a burgeoning sea turtle season continues to grow, Turtle Czar Mike Reynolds recalled a joke he made with his wife.

“A few weeks ago I was kidding with my wife saying I was looking forward to the day when we get 15 nests,” Reynolds said. “I was thinking that may be a long, long way away and then all of a sudden we hit nine in one day. All of a sudden 15 seems really attainable.

“We’re still years from that, but I can see it coming.”

One recent Wednesday morning, June 14, Share the Beach volunteer beach patrollers discovered nine nests on Alabama beaches. The previous record day was seven nests and it happened in 2012, a record year for Alabama turtle nesting.

Reynolds said nesting is ahead of the pace needed to top 2012 when 149 nests were made in Alabama sand.

 “It’s been really interesting,” he said. “We have 69 nests and practically a month ahead of where we were last year. And still five or six days ahead of where we were in our record year.”

Since June 14 those numbers have grown again with an addition of six on June 21 alone.

There were 111 nests in Alabama during the 2015 turtle season and this year’s total is through June 17.

“I am surprised that there is this many nests and I’m very happy about,” Reynolds said.

About 79 percent of those nests are west of Little Lagoon Pass, Reynolds said, with a total of 46.

“In Baldwin County west of the (Callaway) pass or 2.7 nests per mile,” he said. “If you go the other way we only have one a mile.”

The other way meaning from the pass to the Flora-Bama. There are a total of 14 in that section of beach. The other nine adding up to the total of 69 are on Dauphin Island.

Reynolds said he is studying to see if there is any effect on where the nests are in relation to the areas cleaned nightly in the Leave Only Footprints program.

“It seems weird to me we are getting nests on areas that are not being patrolled at night time with the beach cleanup” he said. “I need to look at old numbers to see if that’s consistent with the nesting pattern every year.

“It just kind of sticks out to me and I’m a little sensitive to it because they are out there at night time with machinery picking up stuff off the beach.”

Reynolds is a big supporter of Leave Only Footprints and loves the results he sees since it was implemented.

“It leaves us with a beautiful beach,” he said. “The beach has not been cleaner since I’ve been down here. But I’m still concerned about the effect on sea turtles.”

One highlight of the season so far have been three nests by turtles nationalgeographic.com calls “the world’s most endangered sea turtle.”

“These numbers include three Kemp’s ridley nests,” Reynolds said. “The one nest at Alabama Point and two of the nests at Fort Morgan are Kemp’s ridley. They are very rare turtles. They used to never nest in Alabama.”

Another highlight has been the return of Ella, a turtle first tagged with a satellite transmitter in 2012 after becoming lost in a rambling tour of the dunes. She came back in 2014 and another transmitter was put on her. The second one stopped working after a few months.

“Then on Wednesday morning she nested again right around the Laguna Key subdivision,” Reynolds said. “The second tag was still on her but the antenna had been knocked off. The batteries were still good in the unit.

“That’s the third time they’ve captured Ella nesting on our beach. She’s apparently nesting every two years. She was within a mile of each nest.”

A team from the U.S. Geological Survey does the tagging and is back in Alabama for the fifth straight year, Reynolds said.

“They patrol at night time from June 1 to about the 20^th of June capturing turtles on the beach, tagging them for the project, and studying their habits,” he said.

Hundreds of volunteers make Share the Beach work, Reynolds said, and the seasoned team leaders have become adept at running their sections.

“All my volunteers are doing a great job,” he said. “My team leaders, we’ve built such a depth of experience here, even during a great year it almost becomes routine because they do such a good job and we know what we are doing.”

More work is needed to mitigate lights on the beachfront that have a tendency to distract sea turtles.

“We need to keep getting the word out and we just need to keep people aware of lights on the beach,” Reynolds said. “That’s still our biggest nemesis.”