The sky is a royal blue and the sun hasn’t yet peeked over the horizon when Nancy Busovne embarks on her biweekly patrol to scout for sea turtle nests. On Wednesday mornings, she walks the long, undeveloped stretch of beach known as Freeman Park, scanning the sand for signs that a mother turtle has been ashore.

The morning starts as beautiful as any at Carolina Beach. A gentle breeze floats in off the ocean. Anglers cast their lines into the surf. The sun rises up to meet fluffy clouds above the water.

Last year, in honor of Busovne’s nearly quarter-century of helping sea turtles, Carolina Beach presented her with a key to the city. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

Upon reaching Carolina Beach Inlet, Busovne turns around and heads two miles back to the south end of the park. She hasn’t found a nest, but sometimes that’s how it goes. As she walks, the clouds darken. One droplet falls. Then another. Suddenly, Busovne is pelted with driving rain. She trudges on. She has no jacket. No umbrella. Yet she remains unfazed. She’s used to the elements on these morning patrols.

When a mother sea turtle swims to shore to nest — often returning to the same area where she hatched — she faces challenges, too. Lights on the beach can disorient her and cause her to return to the ocean without laying her eggs. If she does decide to nest, she’ll struggle up the beach on flippers built for swimming, not walking on sand.

At the spot where she makes her nest, she digs a hole with her hind flippers. She lays her eggs, then covers them with sand and begins her slow crawl back to the surf. Her job as a mother is done. Her children must fend for themselves — with help from volunteers like Busovne, a member of the Pleasure Island Sea Turtle Project.

The nonprofit, all-volunteer organization known to many as PISTP aims to further the conservation of all species of sea turtles. Its volunteers educate the public, protect and monitor nests between Kure Beach and Freeman Park, and rescue sick or injured turtles that wash ashore in those areas.

When Busovne started volunteering with PISTP in 2001, it was her job to monitor nests on the brink of hatching. She remembers her first, in front of The Savannah Inn in Carolina Beach. “I got so attached to that nest,” she says, “they actually gave me a room there. I lived in The Savannah Inn for a week because I just did not want to leave that nest.”

Busovne has been volunteering with the Pleasure Island Sea Turtle Project since she spotted a flyer at the post office in 2001. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

She checked on it every morning, then came back every afternoon to sit by it through the evening. She visited again each night, waking in the wee hours. She didn’t want to miss a thing. She felt protective of the tiny babies that lay hidden in the sand. Friends and other volunteers came to sit with her, talking in whispers to avoid disturbing the eggs.

One day, Busovne saw the sand above the nest sink down, and she knew it was about to hatch, or “boil.” Electric with anticipation, she called her project mentor, Nola Jackson, who came straight from church and hiked up her skirt to get down to work.

Rain had just started to fall when one baby turtle — “a little scout,” Busovne says — poked its head out of the sand. More little heads poked out. In an instant, the whole nest boiled, all of the hatchlings spilling out at once. The volunteers helped guide the babies toward the ocean. And in that moment, Busovne says, something clicked: “I was hooked ever since.”

While that first nest was meaningful to Busovne, her best memory in nearly a quarter-century of working with the PISTP happened in 2009, when she was volunteer coordinator. At about 3 o’clock one morning, her phone rang. It was a police officer who’d discovered something weird on the beach: a huge set of turtle tracks, larger than any he’d ever seen, and eggs laid sporadically over a wide swath of the sand.

Busovne went down to check it out. Right away, she recognized the nest of a leatherback turtle — the largest sea turtle species in the world, measuring up to six feet long and weighing up to a ton. The eggs laid on top of the sand were probably yolkless “spacer” eggs, something that loggerheads and greens — the two more common species that nest in the area — don’t do.

Twice a week from May through August, Nancy Busovne walks along Carolina Beach at dawn, searching for signs that a sea turtle has been ashore. If she sees the telltale tracks, she knows a nest might be nearby. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

This was the first leatherback nest recorded at Carolina Beach in more than 20 years. Rather than assigning a nest leader, Busovne decided to get everyone in the PISTP involved to monitor the nest around the clock. Every night after work, she sat watch for three or four hours. When the eggs began to hatch, the call made its way down the PISTP phone tree, and more than 100 volunteers arrived to greet the leatherback babies.

As the hatchlings emerged, Busovne sobbed tears of joy. “It was the most beautiful thing,” she says. “These leatherbacks, they come out really slowly. They’re about the size of my fist, and they just unfurl their long flippers. It’s almost like a ballet.”

The experience was particularly special for Busovne, who’s loved the ocean since childhood. “The smell of the salt, the sea creatures that live in it. The legends and the ghost stories. Analyzing things I found on the beach. All of it was fascinating,” she says. “As a child, I wanted to work with Jacques Cousteau and travel the world on one of his research vessels and study marine creatures.”

After baby sea turtles hatch, the “little scouts” as Busovne calls them, need guidance as they return to their watery homes. photograph by Jami Thomas of Jami Thomas Photography

Busovne feels she was born with a drive to do environmental work. Growing up in South Carolina, she enjoyed watching Flipper and reading Ranger Rick magazine. When she was about 7, she organized a trash pickup for the neighborhood kids. As an adult living in Carolina Beach, she once climbed a scrub oak behind her house and refused to come down until she received a written statement from a developer that the tree would not be felled.

But, years earlier, when it came time to pick a college major, her parents had talked her into studying accounting because they thought it was more practical than marine biology. Now, Busovne sees her work with the sea turtles — and passing her passion on to new volunteers — as an opportunity to live out a lifelong dream.

On Friday mornings, Busovne starts her patrol at the Ocean Boulevard access in Carolina Beach and hikes north for a mile before turning back at Atlanta Avenue. If she spots the telltale tracks of a mother turtle — they look like tractor tire marks leading inland from the crashing waves — she’ll spring into action to protect the nest.

Walking the beach this Friday with fellow volunteer Debbie Donnelly, Busovne gets word that a nest has been found farther north. While Donnelly continues to patrol, Busovne heads to the nest. There’s plenty of work to do. First up is digging for eggs. The purpose is twofold: to verify that there are eggs in the nest, and to collect a shell for DNA testing, allowing the PISTP to track which turtles are nesting on which beaches.

When volunteers find a nest, the first thing they do is dig by hand to make sure there are actually eggs buried in the sand. “It really is a miracle to think that in the sand, all this development’s going on and all this new life is being created,” Busovne says. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

Busovne shows the newer volunteers how to find the eggs, pointing out a small mound of sand that the mother turtle threw on top of them. The group gets to work. They dig with their hands, as shovels could damage the fragile shells.

“It’s the best feeling in the world when you’re over that egg chamber. The sand will get really soft and kind of sink beneath your hand, and you know you’re close,” Busovne says. “Then you gently go a little bit farther, and you can feel the eggs. Hunting for eggs is my very favorite thing to do.”

The volunteers retrieve an egg for testing, then re-cover the rest with sand. Busovne demonstrates how to lay a fox cage — a sheet of orange plastic mesh — to protect the nest from predators like foxes and coyotes, and how to stake it off to mark its location and prevent beachgoers from disturbing it. When it’s nearly time for a boil, volunteers will create a corridor out of black silt fencing to guide the hatchlings to the water, as lights left on at beach properties can lure them away from the surf.

The number of nests the volunteers find each year varies, but they have seen increases from seven or eight in the PISTP’s infancy to about 20 in the past couple of years. For loggerhead and green turtles, whose populations are listed as threatened in this part of the Atlantic, every nest counts.

“These creatures are ancient. They have survived many extinctions. They’ve been around longer than a lot of the animals on the planet, and that’s got to be for a reason,” Busovne says. “They’re beautiful, wise, old souls, and it’s an honor that they’re choosing our beaches to come to and lay their precious eggs.”

Since her days of ardently monitoring nests, Busovne has handed off the task to other volunteers, favoring early morning patrols instead. Working with the turtles has given her a deep sense of purpose. “Now I’m honored to spread that purpose to the next generation,” she says. “I want to see people get that feeling like I got when I started doing it the first time.”

After making their nests at Carolina Beach and elsewhere along our coast, mother turtles slowly make their way down the sand, back to the watery depths they call home. Photography courtesy of Nancy Busovne

Her leadership role with the PISTP also gave her the confidence to start her own business. Through Coconut Jack’s Tours, she leads kayak trips to Shark Tooth Island and down the Black River, as well as paddleboard tours along the canal at Carolina Beach.

“It made me believe in myself and realize that I can do anything I set my mind to,” she says. “And the fulfillment that comes from knowing you’re taking an active role in saving a threatened species — it’s a pretty big deal, what we’re doing out there, and it’s a privilege to get to do it.”

Sometimes it rains; sometimes it shines. Sometimes Busovne finds a nest; sometimes she doesn’t. She takes the ups with the downs. The knowledge that she’s supporting the survival of these ancient, threatened species keeps her coming back.