Every summer there are almost two hundred sea turtle nests on the Oak Island and Caswell barrier Island beaches. Every morning volunteers walk the beach looking for new nests, and mark the locations on GPS. Then they dig down and remove one egg for DNA records. Then when the hatch is nearly ready the volunteers create a lined path for the hatchings back into the surf. And when they hatch the volunteers watch to see that they reach the water safely. Average nests of 120 baby turtles each mean that about 24,000 hatchlings are returned to the ocean every year from our beach alone. Survival rates are not that good and less than one in a thousand make it to maturity.