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The Leaving of The Fleet
ortuguero beach is desolate. The tourists that arrived in hoards during the
turtle nesting season are now trickling into Tortuguero in small numbers to
see the last of the green turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs. The
green turtle nesting season is coming to an end.
Last week was busy, not for green turtles, but for hawksbills, not greens! We encountered four in the period of a week, the same number as for the rest of the entire green turtle program. Jairo, one of the Costa Rican research assistants, found one of them during a nest survey, nesting at 8:30 AM in the morning! The female hawksbill had decided the clouds and
sprinkling rain had made the day as good as a night for nesting and come
ashore early in the morning just in front of Mawamba lodge, one of the
local hotels. She was surrounded by 200 happy tourists snapping away
with their cameras, filming every movement of the nesting process and
talking excitedly about their luck in encountering a turtle on the beach
during the day. The tour guides informed the tourists that it was a
hawksbill, the most critically endangered sea turtle species that
nests in Tortuguero. Well worth an extra tip.
Actually, hawksbills nesting during the day is not such a rare sight. Last
year we encountered a hawksbill one afternoon whilst walking on the beach
For other hawksbill populations daytime nesting is normal. In the
Seychelles, off the east coast of Africa, most hawksbills nest during the
day. They are smaller than green turtles, and of course smaller than
leatherbacks, and are less at risk of overheating on the beach during the day,
especially when its overcast and with a light rain.
The hawsbill rush was last week, when we still saw lots of turtles
on the beach at night and when the sand would be covered with turtle tracks
in the mornings. This week the nesting activity has slowed down
considerably. Only the occasional odd turtle still crawls up the beach under the
cover of darkness to lay her eggs in a last minute effort before migrating to her feeding habitat. We know from tag returns that the Tortuguero green turtles tend to feed in the shallow sea grass beds of Caribbean Nicaragua, where they find their vegetarian food in abundance. We also know that some of the green turtles will swim to other parts of the
Caribbean when they are not in Tortuguero. Perhaps some of this year's tags
will be sent back to us by a Colombian from the Guajira Peninsula, by a
fisherman in the eastern Caribbean or by a turtle researcher at Isla
Mujeres off the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. If the green turtles we have
seen this year manage to run the gauntlet past all those wanting turtle
meat for dinner, the same female turtles might come back in two or more
years to be found by future CCC volunteers and researchers. Or they may
be found by a local tour guide who finds the turtle and shows it to a group of tourists.
Today, the beach is like a clean slate, there are very few turtle tracks to be
found along the shore. If not for the remains of baby turtles spread
out like macabre islands in the sea of sand, no one would believe that this
beach is the most important nesting beach for green turtles in the Western
Hemisphere. In doesn't look different from a hundred other beaches in the Caribbean.
There are tropical beaches were turtles come ashore to nest throughout the
year but Tortuguero is not one of them. Although there might be the odd
turtle coming to nest almost any week of the year, the vast majority of the
females arrive from June to October. The rest of the year is left for
leatherbacks (March to June) and solitude.
The green turtle program continues until the end of November. We will continue to monitor
the turtle nests we marked in September until they hatch. We will
excavate the smelly remains and determine how many hatchlings made their way
out of the sandy womb to the dangers of the beach and the sea. Only four of
the research assistants remain, the others have left for further study,
travels or conservation jobs around the world. The field station will become
more and more quiet over the coming months.
Once the turtle fleet has left and all the little hatchlings are safely gone, the turtle researchers will follow suit. Like the sea turtles, we will migrate like nomads of conservation between nesting beaches and academic offices. We will be back next year, in March, when leatherbacks again arrive to Tortuguero to continue the ancient ritual of reproduction that there ancestors have perfected over the eons. There will be new volunteers, new students from around the globe and more turtles abandoning their underwater safety for the perils of the sandy beach. We will be there again to count the creatures from the sea, to contribute to their protection and to work with the local people to preserve the turtles of Tortuguero.....where will YOU be?
Hasta el otro año,
Sebastian Troëng
Research Coordinator
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