Why Highland Beach's Small Stretch of Sand Keeps Out-Nesting Its Bigger Neighbors

Right now, on nights when the moon is thin and the tide is right, hatchlings are pulling themselves out of the sand along Highland Beach's shoreline and scrambling toward the water. Nesting season officially runs March 1 through October 31, which means the town is deep into its final stretch. Most of what's happening this month isn't new nests going down. It's old ones opening up. A female that crawled ashore in June is now, roughly two months later, watching her nest split open from a comfortable distance in the Atlantic, if turtles can be said to watch anything.

That timing matters if you live here, because the thing that decides how many of those hatchlings actually make it to the water is happening on your street, not in a lab. It's your porch light.

A short beach with a disproportionate tally

Highland Beach's own municipal website makes a claim that most residents have probably scrolled past without registering: the town's roughly three-mile stretch of oceanfront produces more sea turtle nests every year than Boca Raton or Delray Beach. Said plainly, that sounds like civic boosterism. Checked against actual counts, it holds up, and the margin is bigger than the sentence suggests.

The Coastal Star, a monthly paper that covers the barrier island towns from South Palm Beach down through Highland Beach, published year-over-year nest tallies for the 2024 season that put numbers to the claim:

Both towns had a quieter 2024 than 2023, which tracks with a coastwide dip that year. But look at the gap. Highland Beach, with a beach a fraction of the length of Delray Beach's, still logged nearly three times as many loggerhead nests. Per mile of sand, it isn't close.

The leatherback numbers complicate a tidy story, which is worth saying plainly rather than smoothing over. In 2023, Delray Beach actually logged more leatherback nests than Highland Beach, 30 to 7. By 2024, that flipped hard: Highland Beach rose to 13 while Delray Beach fell to 12. Leatherbacks are rarer, more erratic nesters than loggerheads, and a swing of a dozen nests on either side of that comparison shouldn't be read as a trend. The loggerhead numbers, which represent the overwhelming majority of nests on this stretch of coast, are where Highland Beach's advantage is consistent and large.

What changed in 2023

The advantage isn't an accident of geography. It traces to a specific decision the town made about its own lighting rules, and the paper trail on that decision is unusually clear.

In late 2022, Highland Beach's town commission was working from a lighting ordinance that its own building official described without much diplomacy.

"Our existing ordinance is pathetic."

That was Jeff Remas, the town's building official, speaking to the Coastal Star about the gap in the code at the time. The old rule offered only broad language about not illuminating the beach. It didn't say anything specific about parking lot fixtures, walkway lights leading to the sand, or how new construction along A1A should handle exterior lighting. Town Manager Marshall Labadie and Commissioner John Shoemaker both pushed for something with more teeth, and the following spring, the commission acted on it. Meeting agendas from April and May 2023 show the town formally amending Section 4-8, "Lighting Restrictions for Protection of Sea Turtles," and Section 30-85, "Coastal Lighting," to bring both new and existing coastal structures under real, enforceable standards rather than a vague suggestion.

That's a two-year arc from "this is pathetic" to a codified fix, and the 2023 and 2024 nesting numbers are the first full seasons that fix has been in place.

What the ordinance actually asks of you

The baseline rule, as the town lays it out, is straightforward: turn off all beachfront lighting from dusk to dawn, March 1 through October 31. That's codified as Ordinance No. 554, found in the Town Code at Article V, Chapter 4, Section 8. The 2023 amendment extended that logic to Section 30-85's coastal lighting standards, which now shape how new builds and renovations along the water are designed, not just how existing homeowners behave after sunset.

In practice, this means the pool light left on for ambiance, the porch fixture that faces the dunes, the security floodlight that flips on with motion after 9 p.m. all fall under a rule that has a specific, science-backed reason behind it. Sea turtle hatchlings orient toward the brightest light on the horizon, which is supposed to be moonlight reflecting off open water. A porch light or streetlamp can outcompete that signal and send hatchlings crawling the wrong way, toward A1A instead of the Atlantic. The rule isn't decorative. It's the mechanism behind the nest counts above.

A record year up and down the same stretch of coast

This particular season carries extra weight because of what's happening just south of town. Biologists at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, which monitors Boca Raton's five miles of beach, confirmed in late August that the city had documented 1,077 loggerhead nests this year, breaking a record that had stood since 1990, when the previous high was 1,075. Boca Raton also set a leatherback record earlier this summer, with 43 nests recorded against a prior mark of 33 set in 2012. Tens of thousands of hatchlings are now working their way to the water along that stretch, and the Boca Raton Tribune reported that officials expect the final tally to climb further before the season closes on October 31.

Highland Beach doesn't publish its own 2026 count with the same frequency, so it isn't possible to say with certainty that this town matched Boca Raton's record-breaking pace nest for nest. But the two beaches sit on the same unbroken run of sand, share the same warm-water conditions that biologists point to when explaining this year's surge, and operate under the same broad set of state protections. If the water immediately south of town is having its best nesting year in 36 years, that's the environment Highland Beach's own three miles are working within right now, on top of an ordinance that already gave this beach an edge before 2026 even started.

How to watch without becoming part of the problem

If you want to see any of this up close, the responsible way to do it is through a monitored program rather than a solo walk with a phone flashlight. Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, at 1801 North Ocean Boulevard in Boca Raton, runs public turtle walk and hatchling release programs during the season and offers free admission to its exhibits, with donations supporting the monitoring work itself. It's a short drive from Highland Beach and staffed by the same conservation team responsible for this year's record counts.

If you come across a sea turtle that appears sick, injured, entangled, or dead anywhere along the beach, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Wildlife Alert Hotline is the number to call: 888-404-3922. Trained responders handle it from there. Beyond that, the guidance from the town is simple and doesn't require any special training: keep your distance from anything marked with stakes, fill in holes before you leave the beach at the end of the day, and take chairs, toys, and canopies off the sand overnight so a crawling hatchling doesn't get stuck behind them.

What's left of the season

There are still weeks of hatching ahead before October 31 closes the books on 2026. Whatever this season's final Highland Beach number turns out to be, the pattern behind it isn't mysterious. A short stretch of beach, a town that rewrote its own rules after admitting they weren't working, and a few thousand households willing to sit in the dark for a few hours each night from March through October. That combination is why this particular three miles keeps outperforming beaches many times its size, and it's a small, specific thing to be proud of if you call this stretch of coast home.

If you're curious about anything else that makes this stretch of coast distinct, from how its zoning shapes new construction to what its ordinances mean for property along A1A, Kelly Gerber is always glad to talk through it. Let's Connect.