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 News from Around Banderas Bay | March 2006 
Lending a Hand to Turtle Rescue
 Cindy Loose - The Washington Post
Hundreds of white coolers line floor-to-ceilingshelves inside a hot, dimly lighted shed. The silence is broken only by what sounds like dozens of fingernails scraping against Styrofoam.
Veterinarian Miguel Flores Peregrina listens carefully to discern which coolers are emitting the scraping sound, identifies three and opens the lids.
Inside, the squirming newborn turtles, each smaller than the palm of my hand, are clawing their way to the top of the sand-filled coolers and trying to bash through their sides of the Styrofoam to freedom. Like all sea turtles, these are born with a natural burst of energy and an ancient instinct telling them to rush headlong into the sea.
Flores and I sift through the sand and lift the babies into a box, then carry them by the light of the moon to the wide, white beach of Playa Las Tortugas, about 100 miles north of Puerto Vallarta. By releasing them at night, we're improving their chances of avoiding land predators. We gently lift them from the box and deposit them about 30 feet from the surf.
And they're off. Two hundred and sixteen tiny Olive Ridley babies born that afternoon, guided by nature toward the shimmering rays of moonlight and into the vast ocean. They are completely on their own, as they are from the moment their mothers pack sand around the eggs and head out to sea for another year. The babies that manage to avoid predators, pollution, the nets of fishermen and other perils will travel thousands of miles; the males will never return to land.
I watch with awe, and a small burst of pride that I've played a tiny role in saving this endangered species.
Various turtle rescue projects welcome volunteers who patrol beaches in a number of countries during turtle nesting seasons. Some are luxury trips; others involve roughing it.
At Playa Las Tortugas — the name of both the beach and an upscale villa complex that fronts it — volunteers willing to work long hours can bunk in a spare, cement-block, palm-thatched turtle camp and research station. Or visitors can rent one of the lovely villas near the camp and volunteer for as many hours at the reserve as their mood dictates.
Unfortunately, the bunkhouse wasn't ready when I visited in late August, so I was forced to stay in a lovely two-bedroom villa surrounded by a tropical garden with a view of the beach.
Each day, I would ride a boogie board in the perfect surf, kayak the pristine river and estuary that borders the property, do a little birding or horseback riding, and tour by car and foot the scenic Sierra Vallejo mountains. Then, at about 9 p.m. each of the three nights I was there, I'd walk a few hundred yards from my villa to the research station. There, I worked alongside trained staff, spotting nesting turtles, then digging up the eggs for incubation before poachers and four-legged animals could rob the nests.
I call it saving a tiny bit of our world and having your vacation, too.
ALMOST TOO LATE
Sea turtles have lived in the oceans of the Earth for 100 million years, biologists say. But in the past 100 years, humans have managed to nearly wipe them out.
Locals remember that as late as the 1970s, the beaches of Playa Las Tortugas would be littered with thousands of Olive Ridley and leatherback turtles each night during nesting season, which runs from July through November in that region.
But the creatures from the era of the dinosaurs were routinely slaughtered for their meat and their shells, their eggs sold as aphrodisiacs in bars. By the time the Mexican government banned turtle kills in 1990, it was almost too late.
Today, workers and volunteers who patrol a five-mile stretch of beach in front of the Playa Las Tortugas villas spot about 1,000 nests each season and gather about 100,000 eggs, most of them from Olive Ridley turtles. Flores Peregina says more research is needed, but he estimates 1 percent of the turtles released will survive to their 60-year maturity.
The camp is one of 48 official turtle camps in Mexico supported at least in part by the Mexican government; ecology groups patrol another 200 beaches sprinkled around the Pacific coast.
Flores has been patrolling the beach for 15 years, at great personal sacrifice. For six months of the year, he lives, apart from his wife and two sons, in the rustic cinder-block building that is the primary structure at the turtle camp. Until 1999, when U.S. developer Robert Hancock bought the property, the building where Flores lived had no electricity or running water.
In the 1990s, when the government cut funding, Flores nearly single-handedly saved the turtles of Playa Las Tortugas. He kept up the station by cutting and selling coconuts growing on Hancock's property. Today the station is funded by the government, by Hancock and by the rock group Mana.
Flores patrols from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily no matter the weather. Twice, he says, he's been hit by lightning. The first time his tongue was paralyzed for days and his whole body tingled, like an arm that's fallen asleep. The second time he couldn't sleep for three days; it was as if he had an internal battery that had been overcharged, he says.
Flores survived, the property manager at Playa Las Tortugas told me, because he's doing God's work. He is a tortuguero — a man who takes care of turtles.
I first meet him at 9 p.m. at the research station, where he and an assistant are waiting on the beach with about eight other visitors staying in the villas. (Neither tortuguero speaks English.)
Within minutes, Flores spots an Olive Ridley sitting motionless just a few yards away. Although the Olive Ridley is considered a small sea turtle —weighing up to 100 pounds, compared with the 1,000- to 2,000-pound leatherbacks — it's nearly the size of a car tire.
We quietly walk along the shore behind the mother turtle, whose hard, shiny shell is colored various shades of rust. After a few minutes, Flores motions us forward.
Won't this bother the turtle? A few minutes ago, yes, it would have, says Flores. But she's already started laying her eggs. At that point, the turtle is in the “zone,” and nothing will deter her from finishing the job she's swum hundreds of miles to accomplish. (You really should stay away from nesting turtles and seek them out only with a trained guide.)
Flores scoops out sand from under the tail of this turtle, digging down about eight inches, then gently begins removing about 40 perfectly round eggs the size of Ping-Pong balls.
We crouch and watch from behind as, one by one, about 60 more eggs drop into the sand pit the turtle has dug. Flores begins handing me eggs, which I put into a plastic bag.
When the movement of her front flippers indicates she's done, we back off. She laboriously fills the hole with sand swept by her front flippers, then she repeatedly lifts and slams her body to the beach, compacting the sand.
After she lumbers awkwardly back to the water, the other visitors leave. Flores walks north along the beach on foot. I head south, riding on the back of an ATV driven by Flores’ assistant, Emmanuel Miramontes.
We ride along the upper edge of the beach, guided only by the light of the moon as we look for either the turtles or the tracks they make dragging their shells over wet sand. Miramontes suddenly stops and turns off the engine. First I see the tracks leading from the surf, then follow them with my eyes until I spot the turtle about 20 feet away.
We watch while she uses all four flipper-like legs to dig a hole. It's a massive effort, and we can hear her grunting. She rests, then pulls herself farther up the beach and digs another hole. Apparently, the first hole wasn't good enough. Miramontes explains that she probably didn't like something about the sand —too wet, or too dry. The second hole is just right, and we can hear soft moans as she drops her eggs. When finished, she, too, hammers her body against the nest — an apparent attempt to hide its existence. In fact, once the surf comes up and covers her tracks, there would be no way to distinguish the patch of sand she's mussed with any other patch.
Once she makes her way back to the water and disappears, we approach the hole and dig up 102 eggs.
In four hours, we see four turtles laying eggs, and find four other nests by following turtle tracks. As we pass back and forth along the length of the beach, we occasionally pass Flores in his solitary patrol. He, too, carries bags filled with eggs. A small group of Mexican marines also crisscrosses our path. They've been invited by Flores to deter poachers, and on occasion they arrest one.
One measure of the effectiveness of the patrols, Flores says, is that the price of a black-market turtle egg has jumped in recent years from the equivalent of 10 cents to US$1.
In addition to collecting eggs and releasing babies, Flores visits schools and encourages the children to protect turtles, and in fact all animals.
“This is primarily an agricultural area, and people are still worried about the basics, like what they are going to eat today,” says Flores. “They tend to have no loving attachments to animals. A lot of people don't even give names to their own dogs. But we pass on the ideas of patience and caring and the importance of these species. Sometimes in class a child will say, ‘My father's a poacher, and I'm going to tell him to stop.’ That's how you make change.”
When the basket attached to the handlebars of the ATV is filled with bags of eggs, Miramontes and I drive to the incubation shed. We fill one cooler for each nest's worth of eggs, alternating layers of sand with layers of eggs. Each cooler is dated, the number of eggs inside noted.
In about 50 days, one egg per cooler will hatch and give off a chemical that will alert the other pre-hatchlings that it's time to come out. Eggs in the coolers in the incubation shed, which is kept at a constant temperature, have a hatch rate of 94 percent. When room in the shed runs out, the staff and volunteers bury them in a fenced yard.
BETTER THAN NATURE
Slightly more than eight out of 10 of those eggs will hatch. That's still better than nature, where about 74 percent of turtle eggs hatch. Flores figures that if no one collected the eggs at Playa Las Tortugas, stray dogs, feral cats and poachers would destroy them all. The female hatchlings that are released on Playa Las Tortugas and survive the dangers of the ocean for eight to 10 years will return to this exact beach to lay their eggs. I doubt that I will be here to see them. But the next evening, as we release the newest batch of turtles hatched that day, I wish them luck in their perilous journey. I say a little prayer that each mother, on her return, will find a tortuguero waiting to greet her. |
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