News

By Willie Howard

    A Boca Raton-based environmental consulting firm has taken over monitoring sea turtle nests on South Palm Beach, ending decades of monitoring by Robert Schonfeld, also known as the “turtle man.”
    Schonfeld started monitoring sea turtles along the five-eighths-mile stretch of beach in South Palm Beach in 1993.
    Working with other volunteers, such as Mary Lacorazza-Genova, he marked nests to protect the turtle eggs and provided data on the number of and type of nests as well as false crawls — those times when female turtles crawl up the beach but don’t lay eggs.
    The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, which regulates sea turtle monitoring on beaches, recently updated its permit requirements and did not renew Schonfeld’s permit for 2017.  Schonfeld, 81, sold his South Palm Beach condominium two years ago and moved to Boynton Beach, four miles from the oceanfront.
    “I had a good run,” he said. “For 25 years, I enjoyed the work I did on the beach very much. But it’s in good hands now.”
    Town Manager Bob Vitas said the Town Council plans to honor Schonfeld for his service.
    Consulting firm D.B. Ecological Services, which monitors sea turtles on Delray Beach and the town of Palm Beach (under contracts with those municipalities related to permits for beach widening), agreed to pick up daily sea turtle monitoring on South Palm Beach at no charge beginning March 1, the start of the sea turtle nesting season.
    “We just picked it up because it needed to be done and we didn’t want to see a hole in the data,” company President Christine Perretta said.
    Meghan Koperski, an FWC biologist who oversees marine turtle permitting, said the November 2016 update of permit requirements was not meant to screen out volunteers.
    Volunteers monitor more than half of Florida’s sea turtle nesting beaches, Koperski said.
     “We have far more volunteers throughout the state than we do paid contractors,” Koperski said. “We greatly value all individuals who are contributing sea turtle nesting survey data, both volunteers and paid contractors.”
Dan Moffett contributed to this story.