Turtle Party

After dark it is pretty quiet here, so around nine o'clock yesterday evening I joined a lesbian couple from California for a night trip by Jeep to a nature reserve where sea turtles come to nest. Doing anything is fun with Patricia and Marianne, the life of whatever party they can find or get started.

The full of the moon had just passed and there was still some activity in the nursery. At the height of the season, as many as twenty thousand turtles will come ashore each night. Using only red coloured pin lights to avoid disturbing the animals, we saw two metre-long females climb out of the sea to the dry sand above the tide line and use their fins to dig nests into which they would deposit about a hundred eggs. Adult turtles returning to this beach are wary of predators as they leave the water and cannot be approached but, once they are committed to laying their eggs, they will not stop and it is possible to get within inches.

Our guide discovered several nests and we watched the hatchlings, each about five centimetres in length, break out through the sand and crawl slowly to the sea, twenty to thirty coming from each nesting site. We had to step cautiously to avoid the hundreds of tiny, struggling creatures. There are always a few nests that miss their timing and emerge in daylight. To save these hatchlings from circling seabirds volunteers walk the beach, collecting them to be kept in water until dark. About a hundred of them were carried down to the waterline in a basket and we released them into the relative safety of the ocean.

Some species can live up to two-hundred and fifty years, but perhaps only one individual in a thousand will make it to adulthood. In spite of the many reserves like the one here and conservation programmes, all but a few varieties of sea turtle remain endangered by extinction.