Turtle nests beat Ga., Carolinas averages
The Associated Press
AUGUSTA — Atlanta Gas Light is moving forward with plans to tear down a historic black church that sits on land contaminated by a former nearby coal gas plant.
The energy company plans to appeal a recent decision by the Historic Preservation Commission, The Augusta Chronicle reported. That decision denied a certificate to tear down the former home of Trinity CME Church.
The move comes despite an ongoing “Save Mother Trinity” campaign to relocate the church to a nearby site.
The church was built by former slaves in the 1890s at the site of the founding of the Christian Methodist Episcopal denomination a half-century earlier.
Atlanta Gas Light said it has been unable to identify any organization which could safety move, restore and maintain the building.
A coal gas plant contaminated land under and around the church for nearly a century until it was replaced by cleaner natural gas in 1955. The surrounding area has been cleared of coal tar residue, and all that remains is contamination beneath the church, according to previous reports.
Atlanta Gas Light encountered fierce opposition to its plans at a recent Historic Preservation Commission meeting.
The company has offered the building “to any organization that can demonstrate it has the funds and expertise to safely move, restore and maintain the building” several times over the past 17 years, but had no viable takers, the Augusta newspaper reported. A sea turtle makes its way through the sand on the beach at Sapelo Island this summer. Rare loggerhead sea turtles laid eggs at a
SAVANNAH — Rare sea turtles nesting on beaches in Georgia and the Carolinas laid eggs at a slower pace this summer after a record-smashing 2016 season.
The nesting season for loggerhead sea turtles that ran from May through August still yielded nest counts well above average, said state biologists who had little hope the turtles would match last year’s impressive performance. They said the latest season gives them more encouragement that the federally protected species may be rebounding.
“We’re still significantly above average,” said Mark Dodd, the biologist who heads the sea turtle recovery program for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. “We generally have a down year after a couple of big years. And if this is our down year, next year should be really good.”
Volunteers scouring Georgia beaches at daybreak throughout the summer counted 2,141 total loggerhead nests. That’s quite a shortfall compared to the 3,289 nests recorded the previous year.
But sea turtles had a nesting boom in the beaches of the Southeast last year, shattering previous records from North Carolina to Florida. Georgia alone saw a staggering 40 percent jump in total loggerhead nests in 2016. The smaller number of nests seen this summer is Shelby Walker / Georgia Department of Natural Resources via AP
slower pace this summer on beaches in Georgia and the Carolinas compared to their record-shattering 2016 nesting season. still 60 percent higher than the state average in Georgia since 1989.
Neighboring states posted similar numbers.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources reported 5,169 loggerhead nests this summer. That’s down from 6,446 nests a year ago — another state record — but still 75 percent greater than South Carolina’s 20-year average. There were 1,181 loggerhead nests tallied over the summer in North Carolina, which hit a record 1,580 nests a year ago.
Loggerhead sea turtles, which can grow up to 300 pounds, are protected by federal law as a threatened species. Each summer, adult females crawl from the surf of the Atlantic Ocean onto beaches to dig nests for their pingpongball sized eggs.
During the nesting season, volunteers from North Carolina to Florida comb the shoreline each day around sunrise to catalog new nests and cover them with protective screens to keep out wild hogs and other predators until the eggs hatch.
Nest numbers can fluctuate wildly year-to-year. Biologists say that’s because female loggerheads tend to lay eggs only every three to four years. But experts say counts have improved significantly over the past three decades, likely thanks to conservation efforts such as requiring shrimp boats to use nets equipped with built-in escape hatches for turtles.