As heat lightening flickered over the Atlantic, we donned our rain gear and quickly set out to release a bucket of hatchlings that had emerged earlier in the scorching sun on the shore. Stirred by the moonlight, the loggerheads scratched sandy flippers at the sides of the bucket as we carried them toward the surf. We gently poured them out and watched them trudge through the sand, leaving crosshatched trails behind.

Some stragglers crawled to the surf, only to be washed backward by the incoming tide. My mother cupped the last little turtle in her hands and, fully clothed, waded in to her knees and placed him into the sea. It was a moment that brought tears to our eyes, but one we’d be forced to grow callous to as the week passed by.

“Don’t use all the cold water!” a voice yelled from the cabin as I finished scrubbing sand from my scalp, trying not to step on the fiddler crabs that lived beneath the floorboards of our outdoor shower.

The five of us had survived our first evening of hands-on volunteer work with threatened sea turtle hatchlings on the delicate beaches of the Wassaw National Wildlife Refuge off the coast of Georgia. For $500 and a promise to pitch in, volunteers got food and accommodation in a basic island bunk.

After toweling off, I raced inside, where my mother Margo and two volunteers were conducting flashlight checks of the cracks and crevices nearest their bunks — essential for attempting a good night’s sleep.

Stacy Norris, an 11th-grade history teacher from Virginia, snapped the sheets of her top bunk while cautiously peering into the cobwebbed beams directly above it. Karen Pettinelli, a student from Massachusetts, slammed the bathroom door, stating that she’d spotted a pair of giant Palmetto bugs scurry into the Kleenex box while she’d been in there brushing her teeth.

I quickly slathered my selection of DEET-laden products over my skin, and discovered 12 new bites.

The next morning, we stumbled from our beds at sunrise to search the six miles of beach for stranded animals and hatchlings. Lisa Perry spritzed herself with bug repellent and ran to alert our team leaders, Mike and Anne Frick, that the rest of us would be ready to go in 10 minutes. She’d volunteered on the project two months prior so was used to the humidity and insects buzzing past her ears at night, and she was the only one who’d gotten any shut-eye. “Hey, it beats sitting in an office wearing pantyhose and high heels all day, doesn’t it?” she said as the screen door slammed behind her.

My mother counted the mosquito bites she’d received overnight—27 on one hand. When I pointed out the dead, 2-inch cockroach I’d smashed with my flashlight after discovering it in my sleep sheet, she decided she’d gotten the better end of the deal. Downing coffee and cold Pop-Tarts, we hopped aboard our Kawasaki Mules and hit the beach.

We discovered a handful of nests that had shown signs of their first successful emergence, as well as a few stragglers attempting the difficult crawl to the surf, in what would soon be the heat of the day. We scooped up the survivors and would release them later that night in cooler temperatures.

While checking one nest, we found ourselves downwind of five rough toothed dolphins that had beached themselves days earlier. Breathing through our mouths, we worked quickly and observed as vultures and buzzards picked through the scraps of the small pod.

Each day and night that followed opened our eyes to new and sometimes gruesome tasks—not for those with weak stomachs. We dug up nests where the first turtles had begun to emerge and tried to save the stragglers. Often, we’d end up retrieving dead and decomposed hatchlings too weak to make it out on their own.

Wearing latex gloves and working deep inside a plastic bucket so as to avoid any squirts from what was inside them, volunteers would pinch open the eggs to determine the stages of development of those that hadn’t yet hatched. Seeing turtles just 50 percent to 75 percent developed, still cradling their yolk sacs, was a common sight—yet one we never grew used to.

By the end of the week, we’d witnessed life and death on Wassaw Island. We studied the aftermath of nests that had been invaded by predators. We watched ghost crabs vanish into their holes, their pincers clamped to the flippers of the hatchlings we’d just released.

We’d learned about the careless effects of humanity on a threatened species from sights like hatchlings trapped under a littered Coca-Cola can. Through trial and error, we’d discovered which insect repellant seemed to work best, and we totaled more than 362 bites among the five of us. We’d done our part to ensure a more successful year for the loggerhead sea turtle population and endured the subtropics for a week, taking away with us a greater respect for the environment and ourselves.