u/Direct_Revolution432

Loggerheads nest on our beaches from May into August, and the eggs take roughly two months to cook in the sand. That means the nests laid back in late May and June are hatching right about now, and it keeps going through September and into October.

Two things about them that I think are genuinely wild:

The sand decides the sex. Sea turtles have no sex chromosomes, so the temperature of the nest during incubation determines whether a hatchling develops male or female. Warmer sand makes females, cooler sand makes males, and the difference is a couple of degrees. As beaches warm, clutches are skewing more and more female.

And they navigate by light. A hatchling digs out at night and runs toward the brightest, most open horizon, which for the entire history of the species meant the ocean reflecting the moon and stars. That instinct is what beachfront development breaks. A lit porch, a parking lot, or an unshaded oceanfront window is brighter than the sea, and hatchlings will crawl inland toward it until they die of exhaustion, get picked off, or end up on Ocean Boulevard.

Which is why the lights-out stuff is not just a rule for the sake of a rule. If you are staying oceanfront: kill or shield exterior lights at night, close your blinds after dark, and skip the flashlights and flash photos on the beach. Also fill in any holes you dug, knock down sandcastles, and get chairs, tents and gear off the sand before dark, because all of it turns into a maze a two-inch turtle cannot get out of.

Roughly one in a thousand of them makes it to adulthood. The females that do come back decades later to nest on the same stretch of coast where they hatched, so the ones crawling out this month may be back here in twenty-five or thirty years.

If you find a nest, a disoriented hatchling, or a stranded turtle, leave it be and call SCDNR or the local turtle patrol (SCUTE covers Horry and Georgetown counties) rather than handling it yourself.

Map is a rough picture from public sightings across the area, not any one beach, so read it as the big picture rather than a spot to go looking.

This isn't a Cape Cod thing anymore - humpbacks feed right off the Rockaways and the mouth of New York Harbor every summer now, close enough that whale-watching boats run out of Riis Landing in Queens. It's the result of a comeback almost nobody notices: the Clean Water Act cleaned up the harbor and a cap on menhaden ("bunker") fishing let the bait fish come roaring back - so the 40-ton animals that eat them followed the food right up to the city's doorstep. July into fall is the peak. You can stand on a Queens beach and watch a whale lunge through a bait ball with the skyline behind it. The map shows where humpbacks have been logged just off the city recently.

NH Audubon's rare bird alert logged an Atlantic Puffin at Star Island on July 4th, and puffins this far south of Maine are a genuine event. A century ago hunters and egg collectors had wiped them off almost every island in the Gulf of Maine - down to a single US pair at the low point. The reason one can turn up off Portsmouth at all: in 1973 a stubborn ornithologist started hand-raising puffin chicks on Eastern Egg Rock and used wooden decoys and mirrors to convince them the island was a thriving colony. Everyone said it wouldn't work. Those restored Maine colonies now send young birds prospecting down the coast - past our nine little islands. And the Shoals have their own version: White and Seavey Islands, right next to Star, host NH's restored tern colony - thousands of pairs of common terns plus endangered roseates, rebuilt from basically nothing since the late 90s. Below: every Atlantic Puffin logged in the region - all of them clustered at the restored colonies up the Maine coast, with the water off Portsmouth empty. That's what the leading edge of a comeback looks like, and the Star Island bird is it, six miles offshore on a handful of bare rocks.

If you've driven past a prairie dog colony around Denver, odds are there were owls down there too. Burrowing owls are little long-legged ground owls that nest in abandoned prairie dog burrows - they literally live underground in the dog towns, bobbing at the entrances by day. They depend on the prairie dogs to dig their homes, which is one reason they fade as the colonies get paved over. This map shows both around the metro. Next time you pass a colony, check the burrow mouths for a little owl staring back.

Late June into July is the best window to see Atlantic puffins in Maine. They only nest on a handful of rocky islands off the midcoast and Down East - Eastern Egg Rock, Seal Island, Machias Seal, Petit Manan - and right now the pairs are raising "pufflings" down in burrows. Eastern Egg Rock is the cool one: puffins were wiped out there and brought back from scratch starting in the 1970s, and it stuck. You pretty much need a boat tour to see them, but they're out there right now. Recent sightings across the Gulf of Maine seen on the map.

Grizzly 399 was born in the Tetons in 2006 and became the most famous grizzly on Earth. She raised litter after litter in full view of the road - including a rare set of four cubs in 2020 - drawing photographers from around the world and showing a whole generation what a wild grizzly's life actually looks like. She was killed by a vehicle just south of Jackson in October 2024, at 28 years old. Her children and grandchildren are still out there. Here's a map of what's been spotted around Jackson Hole and the Tetons lately - bears, bison, moose, and a lot more.

Is it just me or does it feel like there’s less fireflies than years past?