Support What You Love!
Help support our mission-driven work and fund essential items and equipment! From symbolic adoptions, to shadowing our biologists, to purchasing a satellite tag that will let you follow a nesting sea turtle on her journey, explore these many actionable ways you can directly contribute to the success of nesting sea turtles and shorebirds on Sanibel and Captiva Islands.
You can also make a general gift to our Coastal Wildlife team here.
Support the island's Shorebirds: Snowy Plovers, Wilson's Plovers, and Least Terns. By symbolically adopting a shorebird, you will be supporting our project by helping with the costs of supplies, such as fencing for nesting areas, which requires wooden posts, signage, hardware, string, and flags. We also conduct various research projects that require supplies such as GPS units and banding equipment. By banding our snowy plovers with unique color band combinations, we are better able to track their nesting success and follow broods until fledging.
What You'll Receive: An adoption certificate, acknowledging that you played a vital role in safeguarding the future of these incredible creatures.
Symbolically adopt a sea turtle nest laid in the 2025 season to play a direct role in protecting sea turtles. Your contribution will help pay for the costs of the program, including necessary equipment such as screening, stakes, flagging tape, signs, vehicle maintenance, and gas.
What You'll Receive: A certificate reporting the results of your adopted nest.
Adopt a stretch of beach of your choice at $1/foot. In addition to contributing financially to research and conservation efforts on your stretch of beach, you will also help raise awareness about sea turtles and shorebirds on our islands. The program gives residents and visitors the opportunity to actively participate in protecting wildlife and conserving coastal resources on Sanibel and Captiva.
What You'll Receive: Reports detailing the results of sea turtle and shorebird nests laid on the adopted beach, rare bird sightings, and the history of banded birds seen on the condo’s beachfront. You will also receive certificates highlighting participation in the program, including the total number of nests protected on the adopted beach. These symbolic adoptions do not indicate property ownership.
Symbolically adopt a nesting loggerhead female from the 2025 sea turtle season!
What You'll Receive: An adoption certificate, as well as an in-depth summary of their individual turtle's 2025 nesting season, which will include the number of nests and false crawls, the hatch success for each nest laid, the number of hatchlings produced, and the general location of each nest.
Symbolically adopt a nesting loggerhead female “forever” from our 10-year dataset. The turtles selected for this program will have a strong record of nesting on Sanibel, ensuring they have a rich history on the island and are likely to return (typically every 2-3 years).
What You'll Receive: The option to name your turtle as well as a personalized letter that includes details of her lifetime history, including when she was first tagged, which years she has been documented on Sanibel, and the number of hatchlings produced from every nest she has laid throughout her history on our island. You will continue to be notified each season the turtle returns to Sanibel, and will receive a summary of each season along with an updated photo. Additionally, you will receive an adoption certificate featuring the name you gave her, as well as a personalized hat featuring the digits from her tag number.
Shadow a Biologist ($500)
Join our Coastal Wildlife team for a hands-on experience in sea turtle and shorebird conservation!
What You'll Do: Spend the day shadowing our biologists as they monitor nests, collect data, and protect coastal wildlife. This unique opportunity gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the vital work that goes into safeguarding these incredible species.
We can only offer five of these experiences. They will be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. Please attend Nest Fest for a chance to win this item!
Our beach vehicles are essential for our patrols to monitor nests, tag nesting female turtles, and collect vital conservation data — but daily use on sand and saltwater causes heavy wear and tear. Your support helps us cover maintenance costs, ensuring our team can continue protecting sea turtles without interruption.
Donate today to keep our conservation efforts moving forward, one mile at a time!
Our shorebird team uses a Canon SX70 camera with a 100x zoom to aid in resighting banded birds and nest monitoring. Using a zoom lens to photograph a nest from outside posted nested areas allows us to monitor the number of eggs and hatching without having to enter the area and cause unnecessary disturbance to nesting birds. Additionally, the camera allows us to resight banded birds and share the data with the researchers around the world who band them.
Having a second camera will allow the shorebird team to split up and resight even more banded birds.
Satellite tags allow us to track sea turtles' movements after they leave the nesting beach, which makes it possible to protect the habitat they rely on for migrations and the areas they live in when they’re not nesting. In 2025 and 2026, our goal is to learn more about how warming waters affects sea turtles’ diving and foraging behavior, migration routes, and home ranges.
With these satellite tags, we will receive data about water temperature, dive depth and frequency, and movement patterns. The cost includes the tag, shipping, data subscription, and application materials for one tag. Tracks can be viewed by donors on a user-friendly platform that has been generously donated by Hammerhead Technology!
What You'll Receive: First-hand access to the maps displaying the turtle’s tracks and periodic updates that include a map of her tracks, the number of miles she’s traveled, and where she has been spending the majority of her time.