ANNA MARIA ISLAND — A distinct track in the sand, some dug-up plants and possibly a clutch of eggs are the only signs of a mother turtle’s nocturnal visit to the beach.

But at sunrise twice a week, Tom and Lois Huntington pull on their Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch T-shirts and search for these markings by the pink glow of early morning.

From late spring to mid-fall, about 70 volunteers take turns searching Anna Maria Island’s Gulf side beaches for turtle nests: marking them off, logging data and protecting them. The information is used to protect the turtle’s nesting grounds from development and misuse that might further harm these already-endangered species.

Statewide in 2009, 2,748 people helped in some way to monitor the 800 miles of turtle-nesting beaches along Florida’s coast. All of it is covered on foot or by all-terrain vehicle every morning from March to October, says Anne Meylan, a research administrator for Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

This group includes some government and military employees, but it is largely made up of volunteer citizens.

“It’s a partnership,” Meylan said. “If it didn’t exist, then collecting all of this data would be impossible.”

As of Friday, volunteers had found 130 turtle nests on the island this season, and so far almost 1,100 baby turtles had hatched and made their way to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Huntingtons first learned of AMI Turtle Watch on a family vacation when their son John, then 9 or 10, met Suzie Fox, the head coordinator of the Anna Maria program.

They were on the beach, and Fox told the boy all about sea turtles, and John told her about his lake turtles — which came on vacation with the Huntingtons from Brandon.

“He dragged Suzie to our house to show her his turtles, and we’ve just been interested in it ever since,” Lois Huntington said.

John, now 24, has moved to New York, and his parents have retired to Anna Maria Island, allowing them to become involved full-time three years ago as early-morning beach walkers.

When searching for nests at daybreak, conditions are always different.

Sometimes high tide forces them to trudge through the beach’s soft sand, while low tides offer a stretch of packed sand. Every so often a pod of dolphins can be seen in the surf, hunting breakfast, and morning joggers are a common sight.

“The sea’s usually very calm and it’s very beautiful, and I’m always surprised by the number of people who are out on the beach in the morning,” Lois Huntington said.

The Huntingtons search for a single long track, made as the mother turtle drags herself across the shore with flippers meant for swimming. The track stretches from the water’s edge, up onto the beach and then back down into the water. So far this summer, they’ve found four nests.

Turtle species are easily identifiable by their tracks, with the irregular, swooshing tread of a loggerhead’s trail being by far the most common. Green turtles and leatherbacks are a possibility, but are rare.

When the Huntingtons spot a turtle track, or “crawl” in Turtle Watch lingo, they call it in to a coordinator, who oversees all volunteers walking a particular section of beach.

“He comes out to verify the nest, if it looks like a real nest and not a false crawl or some other unrelated marking, then he’ll dig down and look for at least one egg,” Tom Huntington said.

Digging for the eggs is a matter of documentation, preservation and, among volunteers, pride, said Glenn Wiseman, a Turtle Watch coordinator.

“It’s always like a contest between the people here on the island, you know,” he said. “The volunteers, they’ll try to find the eggs in the first hole you dig in, and if you dig six or seven holes everybody teases you.”

While there is a little luck in finding the eggs on the first dig, there is also a good deal of skill and knowledge that qualifies a coordinator for the position.

When Wiseman first comes to a crawl, he tries to read it, figuring out the story of the mother turtle’s foray onto land.

A healthy crawl shows a turtle that traveled perpendicular to the shore line, laid her eggs and then came straight back to the water. But sometimes the track wanders, traveling along the beach or towards lights on houses that confuse turtles, one of the reasons for a public education campaign on keeping the beaches dark at night.

Wiseman or another coordinator will then fill out a data sheet, drawing a diagram of the turtles crawl, measuring out the length of the track and marking the GPS coordinates of the laid eggs. That information is sent to Florida Fish and Wildlife to be catalogued with all the other sea turtle data collected along Florida’s coast each year.

He then prepares to dig into the small mound of piled sand where the dozens of eggs, which resemble leathery ping-pong balls, might be found. By studying the areas flattened by the mother’s shell and the direction sand was thrown, Wiseman can be fairly certain of the eggs’ location within a few inches before he even starts digging. Often it takes him only a few moments to confirm his suspicion.

“It’s like a little puzzle that you’re trying to solve, so it’s kind of fun,” said Wiseman’s wife, Claudia, a fellow coordinator.

This process is in contrast to the earlier days of sea turtle conservation, when coordinators would cut the ends of golf clubs and poke them into the sand, confirming the nest when they pulled up yolk.

“That’s one of the ways we’ve evolved and gotten better in our technique,” Claudia Wiseman said.

Around late July, several months into the season, baby turtles begin to squirm out from the sand. The Wisemans and other coordinators take on the responsibility of excavating nests to count the number of eggs and how many hatched.

“You really don’t want to find hatchlings left over, but every once in a while you’ll find one. It feels cool, plus you feel like you’re saving them,” Claudia Wiseman said.

The current incarnation of Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch, with its focus on getting out of nature’s way as much as possible and educating the public, is largely the work of Suzie Fox, who received the sea turtle conservation permit for the island in 1996.

Fox learned of the program six years earlier when a friend, who was trying to bring Fox out of a depression over her mother’s death, suggested they walk the beach together.

“I was not sleeping anyway, so she had me follow her around the beach one morning and find a turtle nest,” she said. “And I have to tell you it was like an awakening for me.”

Since then, Fox has built Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch into a cultural institution.

“I giggle when I say that I have 72 or 73 volunteers plus the other 5,000 on the island, it’s definitely a community program,” Fox said. “It could probably be done on an ATV with five people but, you know, we’ve stayed a grassroots organization because the public loves this.”