Ann Arendarczyk scans the beach for the tell-tale signs that a Kemps ridley turtle has emerged from the water to lay its eggs in the soft sand.

It looks like someone has dragged a cooler box or a chair through the sand, she told me as she walked along the beach of South Padre Island on the steamy southeast Texan coast.
Ann is a local volunteer and her mile and a half stretch of beach is along a developed part of this popular Texan resort island. It is lined with towering hotels, bars and restaurants.

Turtles dont often come here to nest because of the crowds but they sometimes do.
Trying to decipher turtle tracks here is much more of a challenge than on the more remote parts of the island or the unspoiled parts of South Africas eastern coastline, where I have observed loggerheads and massive leatherback turtles nesting before.

Even at this early hour of the morning there are plenty of human-made signs in the sand, possibly obscuring any turtle signs. Plenty of cooler boxes have been dragged around here.
Ann is part of a volunteer turtle patrol network that locates nests, which are then moved to a coral for protected hatching. Other volunteers patrol the less developed parts of the island in ATVs.

They are part of Sea Turtle, Inc, a rescue and rehabilitation outfit devoted to turtle conservation.

The Kemps ridley only nests on the southeast Texan coast and in Mexico. By 1985 egg hunters and coyotes had brought their numbers down to about 300 nesting females.
Now they number around 11,000, the vast majority in Mexico, making efforts to save them a rare example of a marine conservation success story.

For the record we found no nesting turtles on our early morning walk. But I wont look at a cooler box track on a beach the same way again.