In November 1974, Bob Prescott was walking a beach in Brewster, Massachusetts, when he found a sea turtle. “Walking on that cold Brewster beach, I was absolutely shocked to discover a sea turtle,” he recalled decades later. It turned out to be the start of a rescue effort that has now recovered more than 10,000 of them.
The problem is geography. Young sea turtles that feed their way north in summer get caught inside the hook of Cape Cod when they try to head south in fall. As the water drops below about 55 degrees, they become hypothermic, stop swimming and wash up on the bay side of the Cape. Most are juvenile Kemp’s ridleys, an endangered species.
Day and night, at high tide
Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary runs the response with a corps of more than 200 trained volunteers who patrol the beaches day and night, especially around high tide, from November into January. A 24-hour hotline takes calls from the public. Turtles are stabilized at the sanctuary in a 55-degree room, then driven to the New England Aquarium’s sea turtle hospital in Quincy, sometimes twice a day.
“They get hypothermic, just like a person would,” Mark Faherty, the sanctuary’s science coordinator, told WBUR. “They get pneumonia, they get infections, sometimes they’re wounded.”
Twenty years ago a season might bring 50 turtles. Now 600 to 800 is typical, and some years top 1,000, a change researchers link to the warming Gulf of Maine. The 2024 season produced 822 turtles, including 141 on a single day in December. In 2025 the volunteers recovered 667, more than three quarters of them alive, over 34 patrol days. On one December night they found 36 turtles between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. in subzero conditions.
Warming cold-stunned sea turtles slowly
At the aquarium, the turtles are warmed a few degrees at a time and X-rayed for pneumonia. The 2025 season began on November 7 with more than 200 patients arriving in two weeks; by mid-December the aquarium had admitted 473. Once stable, many are flown to partner facilities around the country, on flights donated by LightHawk and Greater Good Charities, and eventually released into warmer water.
“These turtles have endured incredibly harsh weather conditions and require very close monitoring, detailed care, and treatments to survive,” said Kathy Tuxbury, the aquarium’s senior veterinarian.
The Kemp’s ridley has its own comeback story. Nesting females fell from about 40,000 in 1947 to under 1,000 in the 1970s, then climbed back past 20,000 by 2012. Some of the turtles that made that climb were once carried off a Cape Cod beach by a volunteer with a flashlight.
Sources
- Mass Audubon, Wellfleet Bay sea turtle rescue
- Mass Audubon, Cold-stunned sea turtles: the 2025 rescue season in review
- WBUR, Cold-stunned sea turtles on Cape Cod (Dec. 2024)
- Mass Audubon, A 50-year journey to save the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle
- New England Aquarium, 2025 stranding season press release (Dec. 2025)
- NOAA Fisheries, Kemp’s Ridley Turtle
