The St. Croix Sea Turtle Project

Quick Links 🐠

SEA TURTLE RESCUE Call 340-690-0474. Have you seen a sea turtle in distress, disoriented, displaced or dead? Please call the VI Sea Turtle Assistance and Rescue (STAR) hotline 24/7 to report and get help. 340-690-0474. We gratefully accept donations to support this work.

Beach Cleanup Help us Tidy up for the Turtles on the last day of 2025. We will be expecting our first nest of 2026 the following week! Sign up here.

Special Events now listed for the holidays. Find us at Striving Artists Day, Fitter Futures Food Truck Festival and at the cruise ships (at CMC Arts Museum) on select days. More info here.

Hawksbill Turtle Race Four hawksbills were satellite tagged this October (2025). See their migrations to their foraging grounds. Where will they end up? Track them here live with us!

Your favorite turtle T-shirt🐢See us on St. Croix at Cottages by the Sea, and at local festivals, through the holidays!

Adopt and name your own turtle Symbolically adopt one of our unique tagged nesting females – your turtle will always be yours! Read more about our adoption program here.

Adopt a hatchling Adopt a hatchling (crochet turtle), and learn about its nest date, when it hatched and who the mom is! Each hatchling adopted supports one critical nesting beach patrol on St. Croix. Read more here.

Volunteer signup We are recruiting new volunteers for 2026. If you’d like to get involved, please sign up to be notified of training opportunities.

2024 Newsletter Download your copy here and see all of the amazing things we accomplished in 2024 🎉

Sea Turtle Crochet Club If you like to craft, please join our crochet club to make sea turtle soft toys for our hatchling adoptions. Read more here.

Discover our Sea Turtles. Are you a St. Croix teacher who would be interested in having our Outreach Specialist make a visit to your classroom? Please let us know your interest by filling out this form. Visits by appointment. This is a free program.

St. Croix Sea Turtle 2025 Nesting (48 beaches reporting: updated 19 December 2025)

Leatherbacks: 48

Hawksbills: 926

Green turtles: 6,572

Our first nest of 2025 was a hawksbill on South Beach on 5 January. 😍 Regular updates to St. Croix nest counts will be posted here. You can find Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge totals on the top of the page (and on the sign at the refuge gate). Please check back often here or follow us on Facebook (@stxleatherbacks) and Instagram (#stxturtles) for regular postings.

Our Sandy Point nest numbers for 2024: 31 leatherback, 1,408 green and 268 hawksbill nests.

For 2023: 17 leatherback, 1,576 green and 239 hawksbill nests. For 2022: 59 leatherback, 1,141 green, and 185 hawksbill nests. For 2021: 94 leatherback, 1,399 green, and 234 hawksbill nests in the refuge❤️

DONATIONS KEEP US GOING! Our project operates completely on grants and donations. We are happy to receive any amount to help our conservation and sea turtle monitoring work. Donations from the public directly support young conservation students, volunteers and graduate students and are tax-deductible.

Take a look around our website. You’ll find information about the intensive sea turtle research and conservation that has been going on since 1977 at Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge. The main focus of the work has been leatherback turtles, but green and hawksbill turtles also nest on these critically important beaches. The St. Croix Sea Turtle Project studies and protects sea turtles in collaboration with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in St. Croix. We are funded by major research grants, private donors and fundraising activities. We provide extensive support for students and volunteers assisting with these projects, including field experience and training, conference attendance and costs, and mentoring during independent research projects.

Other projects of the St. Croix Sea Turtle Project include collaborative sea turtle studies in Pacific Mexico, on US mainland beaches and throughout the Wider Caribbean. We are excited to share with you our discoveries and progress 🙂

GET IN TOUCH You can contact us at stxturtles @ gmail.com or follow us on Facebook and Instagram. We look forward to hearing from you.

**Above. A hawksbill turtle nesting in the early morning hours. ❤️

The St. Croix Sea Turtle Project is sponsored by The Ocean Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization, in cooperation with US Fish and Wildlife Service at Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands.