Walk the beach at dusk this week and you'll still find them: wooden stakes and pink tape marking off nests, a handful of orange flags where volunteers have already logged a crawl. It's the last stretch of hatching season, and by most accounts, 2026 has been a banner year for loggerhead sea turtles on the Georgia coast. The state's overall nest count topped 4,110 by early August, the highest total recorded since researchers began surveying all of Georgia's barrier islands back in 1989.
If you live on St. Simons Beach, that record probably isn't about your stretch of sand.
The islands driving Georgia's comeback season sit close by. Jekyll, Little St. Simons, and Sea Island together logged more than 16,000 hatchlings in the 2025 season alone. St. Simons Island, separated from Jekyll by barely a mile of water, has spent recent seasons as the quiet outlier. In the 2025 season, as of mid-July, St. Simons accounted for just one of more than 1,700 loggerhead nests recorded along the entire Georgia coast that year, according to reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. One nest, on an island surrounded by neighbors setting records.
The gap isn't about habitat. It's about what happens after dark.
Same Coast, Same Species, Different Math
Loggerhead hatchlings don't navigate by memory or instinct in the way people imagine. They crawl toward whatever point on the horizon looks brightest, which on an undeveloped beach is the moon reflecting off open water. Line that beach with porch lights, pool lighting, and unshielded exterior fixtures, and the brightest point shifts inland. The hatchlings follow it anyway.
Mark Dodd, who coordinates the Georgia Department of Natural Resources' sea turtle program, has explained the mechanism directly to county officials during the recent zoning debates: light that spills onto the beach, faces the wrong direction, or bounces off nearby buildings and vegetation reads to a hatchling exactly like the ocean does. It doesn't matter whether the fixture belongs to a homeowner, a hotel, or a highway interchange.
That last part matters here too. High-mast lighting installed around the new roundabout at Interstate 95's Exit 42, near the Buc-ee's that opened in 2025, produced skyglow that researchers tracked reaching nesting beaches on Little St. Simons Island twelve miles away during the 2025 season. The Georgia Department of Transportation has said the county could turn the lights off without compromising driver safety. As of a report this June, they were still on.
Closer to home, the numbers get more specific. Catherine Ridley, who directs the St. Simons Island Sea Turtle Project and also serves as vice president of communications for the conservation nonprofit One Hundred Miles, has pointed researchers to misorientation data plotted across both Sea Island and St. Simons. Sea Island's rate runs close to double the statewide average, with roughly 22 to 23 percent of nests showing significant misorientation in recent years. That's more than one nest in five where a meaningful share of hatchlings never make it to open water at all.
The Ordinance That Was Supposed to Fix This
Glynn County has known about the mismatch for a while. Its beachfront lighting rules dated back to 1984, the same year most of the county's current homeowners were buying different cars and different haircuts. A rewrite had been in progress since 2019, and by November 2025, county staff had drafted language that finally addressed not just whether a light shines on the beach, but the direction it faces and the wavelength of the bulb itself.
Then the draft changed. Between December 2025 and February 2026, much of that language disappeared from the version headed to a final vote, according to reporting from The Current GA. Ridley called the walk-back a step backward from seven years of negotiation. Robert Ussery, a local architect who served on the advisory workgroup, described the process as an attempt to balance two constituencies who rarely agreed: conservation advocates and beachfront property owners, with the former dominating early conversations before owners pushed back later in the process.
The debate got personal through the first months of 2026. At a January town hall on St. Simons, Lauren Zinskie, CEO of the Golden Isles Association of Realtors, raised concerns that the ordinance's enforcement language was vague enough that a violation could theoretically cost a homeowner their certificate of occupancy. County staff clarified that wasn't the intent. Sharon Altenbach, representing the Sea Island Property Owners Association, echoed the request to simplify the rule at that same meeting. Weeks later, as the draft moved toward its final vote, Courtlyn Cook of the county's Island Planning Commission argued that requiring red and amber bulbs on renovated beachfront homes unfairly burdened owners who'd already sunk money into recent updates and planned to pass the house to their children.
The Glynn County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to adopt the rewritten ordinance on April 16, 2026. It took effect July 1. Here's how the three barrier islands compare under the new framework:
| Barrier island | Shoreline ownership | Lighting rules | Recent nesting reality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jekyll Island | Owned by the State of Georgia | Updated, turtle-specific ordinance in place since 2008 | Consistently far outpaces St. Simons despite sitting about a mile away |
| St. Simons Island | Private homeowners | 1984-era baseline retained; new standards apply only to renovations and new construction starting July 1, 2026 | Logged just 1 of Georgia's 1,700-plus loggerhead nests through mid-July 2025 |
| Sea Island | Private homeowners and property owners association | Same 1984-era baseline as St. Simons | Among the highest hatchling misorientation rates documented in the state, roughly double the statewide average |
What Actually Changes on Your Street, and What Doesn't
The county's own announcement of the final ordinance describes the beachfront lighting section as preserving existing sea turtle protections while placing them in a clearer part of the code. What that framing leaves out is the trigger mechanism. The updated standards, including the shielded-fixture and directionality requirements Dodd described, apply only when a property owner alters or renovates their home going forward. A house that hasn't touched its exterior lighting in twenty years is under no new obligation to change anything.
Ussery's read on this is that beachfront properties change hands and get renovated often enough that compliance will arrive gradually, on its own timeline. Ridley's concern is the opposite: that a rule triggered only by future construction leaves no mechanism to address the lighting that's already out of compliance tonight, on beaches that are, by her account, largely out of compliance right now. Both things can be true. The ordinance sets a direction for the housing stock over the next decade. It does very little for the six weeks of hatching season still ahead of us this year.
The Part of This Season Still in Your Hands
If you live on or near St. Simons Beach, the county's timeline isn't really the one that matters right now. Hatchlings are still emerging from nests laid earlier this summer, and they'll keep emerging into October. The St. Simons Island Sea Turtle Project runs on a small crew, about 15 volunteers who walk the beach daily during nesting season to mark nests and check on hatching activity. Their work only goes so far against a porch light left on overnight.
A few things make a real difference this month, independent of anything the county requires:
- Turn off exterior lights that face the beach after dark, or switch to low, shielded, amber-toned fixtures if you need them on
- Keep blinds or curtains closed on beach-facing windows in the evening, since interior light reads the same way to a hatchling as a porch fixture does
- Skip the flashlight or phone light if you're walking the beach at night. Even briefly, it can be enough to redirect a hatchling inland
- Fill in holes and knock down sandcastles before you leave the beach for the day. They can trap hatchlings and nesting females on their way to the water
- If you spot a disoriented hatchling or an injured turtle, contact the St. Simons Island Sea Turtle Project or Georgia DNR rather than handling the animal yourself
Georgia's turtles are having their best year in almost four decades. Whether St. Simons Beach shows up meaningfully in next year's count has less to do with what the county just adopted and more to do with what happens on individual porches between now and the last hatchling of October.
Living somewhere long enough to notice these things, a lighting ordinance nobody talks about, a nesting gap nobody explains, a volunteer group doing more with fewer resources than people assume, is its own kind of local knowledge. If you're weighing a move on St. Simons Beach or just want someone who tracks this coast closely, Lori Lynn is always glad to talk it through.
