Good morning! I'm Lois Orosco. I taught fourth grade for thirty-one years, and when I retired in 1993 a friend talked me into walking the beach with her one morning in June to look for turtle tracks. I've been out there nearly every morning of every nesting season since. I am 66 years old and I have never been so fit in my life, or gone to bed so early.

Our group of volunteers works under a state permit, held by our coordinator, Teddy McCallister, who has been doing this longer than any of us. Each of us has a stretch of beach and a set of days. Mine is two miles, and I walk it seven mornings a week from May through October, with help from Lenore Patton on Tuesdays and Fridays. Paul Meacham has the two miles to the south of me. We keep a clipboard, a bag of wooden stakes, a roll of bright orange tape and a thermos of coffee, and we are on the sand at first light.

This page is for the people who visit our beaches, and for anyone who has ever wondered what those little roped-off squares in the sand are. Read it the way my students used to read the board: all the way to the bottom, please.

The alarm goes off at 5:15. In June the sky over the ocean is already turning gray by the time I park at the beach access, and I start walking as soon as there's light enough to see the sand. We have to be quick. The night's tracks have to be found, read and recorded before the joggers and the beach rake and the morning wind wipe them away.

I walk the upper beach between the water and the dune, eyes down. A crawl is easy to spot once you know it: a wide, rough path coming up out of the surf, as if somebody dragged a tractor tire up the beach. When I find one, I follow it up toward the dune and read what happened at the top. Did she nest, or did she change her mind and go back to sea? (That's what we call a false crawl, and turtles make a lot of them. A light, a noise, a root in the sand, a person on the beach, and she turns around.)

If she nested, I mark it. Our nests get wooden stakes and orange tape around them, and I write the date and the nest number on the stake in marker. I fill in the data sheet: species, location, time. Then I rake out the tracks with my foot so I won't count them twice tomorrow, and I walk on.

On a busy morning at the end of June I might find thirty crawls in two miles and not get home until nearly ten. On a quiet morning in late September there's nothing but ghost crabs and seaweed, and I just check the nests that are left. I love both kinds of mornings. There is nothing like having the beach to yourself while the sun comes up out of the Atlantic.

Every species crawls in its own way, so you can tell who came ashore just by looking at the sand. Here is the lesson I give every new volunteer. There will be a quiz.

Nest or false crawl? Follow the track to the top. A false crawl is a U: up the beach and back down, maybe with a half-dug hole she gave up on. A nest has a wide, messy, churned-up area where she dug, laid her eggs, covered them and then flung sand all around to hide the spot, before she turned and went back to the water. The eggs are under there somewhere, a foot or two down. We don't dig to find them. We stake the area and let them be.

Florida's nesting season runs from about May through October. Brevard County's beaches are among the busiest loggerhead nesting beaches in the country, and loggerheads made nearly all of my nests again this year, with some greens in the middle of the summer and one leatherback.

Our first nest of the year was a loggerhead on Monday, May 3. My one leatherback came on Tuesday, May 11, and I'll tell you, I walked the length of that track twice. Nesting peaked in the last two weeks of June, when we were finding more than thirty nests a week, and slowed way down by August. The last new nest on my stretch was the first week of September.

A nest takes about two months to hatch, so the first nests hatched at the end of June, and the hatching has gone on all summer. A few days after a nest hatches, our permit holder digs it up and counts what's inside: empty shells, eggs that didn't hatch, and now and then a live straggler or two, who go free at the water's edge that night. That's how we know how the season went. Our counts so far average around seventy hatchlings out of each nest, which means something like twenty thousand little loggerheads have left my two miles of beach since June.

The week-by-week numbers are on the 1999 Nest Log page. My former students will be glad to know the columns add up. I checked them twice.

You all saw it on the news. In the middle of September Hurricane Floyd came across the Atlantic, enormous, and for a day or two it looked as if it might come straight at us. Those of us on the beach side were told to leave, and on Tuesday the 14th I packed the car, the cat and my nest records and went to my son's house in Orlando, along with what seemed like half of the east coast of Florida. It took most of the day.

We were lucky. The storm stayed out at sea and turned north, and the Carolinas got the worst of it, the poor souls. But even from far offshore a storm like that sends in tremendous surf. When I got back out on my two miles on Thursday morning, the waves had come all the way up to the foot of the dune in places and cut it into a little cliff, three feet high in spots. Most of my stakes were gone or lying flat.

That was hard. Most of the season's nests had already hatched, thank goodness, but we still had close to sixty in the sand, the late ones from August and the end of July. Fourteen of them were washed out completely. Others were washed over by salt water for a few hours, and we don't know yet how those will do. We re-marked every one we could find from our records, and I've been walking them every morning since. Two of the washed-over nests have hatched this week. I nearly cried, both times.

It's nature, and turtles have been nesting through hurricanes for a very long time. But I'll be glad when this hurricane season is over.

Here's the part I most want you to read. Class, eyes up front.

1. Lights out on the beach. When hatchlings come out of the nest, almost always at night, they head for the brightest horizon. On a natural beach that's the open sky over the ocean. A porch light, a pool light, a parking lot, or a condo with the curtains open can pull them the wrong way, up the beach and into the dunes, the road, the pool deck, where they dry out or get eaten or run over. If your house or your hotel room faces the beach, turn off the lights you don't need and close the curtains from May through October. Your porch light matters. It really does.

2. No flashlights or flash pictures on the beach at night. Same reason, and a nesting mother can turn around and go back to sea without laying if you shine a light on her.

3. Fill in your holes and knock down your sand castles before you leave. A hatchling that falls into a hole can't get out, and a nesting turtle can get stuck or turned around.

4. Take your chairs, umbrellas and toys in at night. A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound loggerhead coming up the beach in the dark has to go around every beach chair you leave behind, and sometimes she just gives up and goes back.

5. Never touch a nesting turtle or a hatchling, and never pick one up to "help" it to the water. Watch quietly from a distance. They're protected by state and federal law, and more to the point, they know what they're doing. If you see hatchlings heading the wrong way, find a lifeguard or one of us, or call the state wildlife officers.

6. Leave the stakes and tape alone. They mark a nest. Please don't move them, sit on them or let the dog dig there.

7. Pick up your trash, especially plastic bags, balloons and fishing line. A floating plastic bag looks an awful lot like a jellyfish to a hungry turtle.

If you'd like to see a loggerhead lay her eggs, there are permitted turtle walks in June and July, led by people who know how to do it without disturbing her. That's the right way to see one. Please don't go looking for them on your own.

For more, I wrote up the questions people ask me most on the beach: Turtle Facts for Beach Visitors. Print it out and stick it on the refrigerator at the beach house.

If you love our Florida beaches in the daytime too, Doris Whitman's The Beachcomber's Log, right here in Sunset, is all about shelling on the Gulf coast: the best tides, how to identify the common shells, and her 1999 finds.