Girl Scouts walk in 50 years of turtle watching footprints

What would happen today if someone was caught digging up a turtle egg on Longboat Key? Would they be dragged to Town Hall? Arrested? Banished from the beach?

Yet from 1969 through the early 1990s, that’s exactly what the Longboat Key Turtle Watch did. In 1969, Orville Clayton and Tom McGrane were both retired. Clayton watched a turtle egg hatch on the beach and was fascinated. There were only nine nests on the entire island. Clayton and McGrane, both founders of LBKTW, used to dig up all the eggs, put them in a cooler and bring them home.

“They had a little pen. When they hatched out, they’d pick up the hatch, take them to the beach, and let them go,” LBKTW President Tim Thurman said. 

Digging up and hatching turtle eggs on lanais continued through the late 1980s until research showed that the temperature of the sand determined the gender of the turtles. The styrofoam coolers had most likely been producing turtles of only one gender, so they started using a hatchery on the beach. 

These were not rogue turtle activists. This was all sanctioned by the Florida Department of Natural Resources. LBKTW has been a permitted organization since 1969. It was simply a different time. 

The hatchery system continued into the early 1990s.

Now, turtle nests are marked with stakes and caution tape and rarely touched. The process is down to such a science that Thurman led a group of Girl Scouts through it, and they earned merit badges. The measurements are precise, so if a stake is lost, a tape measure will tell you where it was located based on the remaining stakes.

The stakes went through their own evolution. There had been attempts before the 1090s to stake nests and leave them alone, but people kept pulling the stakes out of the sand and using them for bonfires. In 1981, the town passed an ordinance that banned fires on the beach.   

An ordinance was passed this season that requires property owners to stack their beach furniture. As Thurman walked along the gulf, he pointed up toward the resorts and said, “See all these chairs being stacked; that’s a beautiful thing.”  

A turtle that gets caught under a beach chair can carry that chair into the water on her back. The weight of the chair in the water can drown the turtle. A stack of chairs is too heavy for a turtle to move. Thurman said property owners are doing a great job of complying with the new ordinance. 

In 2019, 50 years after Orville dug up his first turtle egg, Girl Scout Shea Polley was researching sea turtles and found LBKTW. Her parents drove from Valrico to take the whole family on a turtle walk. 

“We did it in the middle of July. The day we did it, there was a hatchling and we got to excavate a nest,” Shea’s mom, Leesa Polley said. 

The experience was so exciting that three years later, the 8th-grader returned with 11 other Girl Scouts and three den mothers. They spent the night at the Girl Scout’s Camp Honi Hanta in Bradenton and rose with the sun to walk the path forged by Orville and McGrane five decades earlier.