Sea Turtles

After a night in San Jose, I arrived in Tortuguero this afternoon. It is on the northern Caribbean coast and is surrounded in water, with no roads, so getting here involves two buses from San Jose followed by a one-hour canal trip in a long, low flat-bottomed boat. Along the way we saw several crocodiles.

The town of Tortuguero is within Parque National Tortuguero, the land portion of which is comprised of 261 square kilometers, including 35km of beach that is the site of the most important nesting area for sea turtles in the western hemisphere. The town itself is spread out along a strip of land in between the principal canal and the ocean and is certainly no candidate for an urban beauty queen. The local architecture is mainly of the cinder-block-and-corrugated-steel variety, accented with iron bars and razor wire. They have a local recycling program but it seems that most just throw the garbage anywhere, including their own yards and along the edge of the beach. Presumably, these are people who, until relatively recently, were accustomed to all of their garbage being biodegradable. However, in this “progressive” age of plasticised everything, nature no longer removes their litter for them, something they have yet to adjust to.

I took a risk and signed up for another tour, partly because one can only observe the turtles laying eggs with an accredited guide, but also because the guide I found is a very experienced and enthusiastic biologist second only to the highly-respected biologist Don Karasiuk (though unlike Don, she does not provide impromptu recitations of situationally relevant classical poetry).
Turtles only show up to nest after dark, so we set out at 8:00pm. It was a 1.5km walk through dark jungle trails to the chosen site (rangers with radios monitor the beaches both to advise guides and to protect the turtles and eggs from poachers). If you’ve ever walked through the jungle during the day and seen the size of the spiders, walking it in the night can be unnerving when a web hits you in the face. However, we made it to the beach with no screaming.

Several kinds of turtles lay eggs here, but the only ones that do so at this time of the year are Hawksbills, which are very rare, Loggerheads, and the most famous, the “Tortugas Verdes” or Green Turtles, which are also the most commonly seen. I was able to observe two Green Turtles. The first had already laid her eggs when we approached her, but we watched her finish filling the hole with sand and then drag her weary body back to the sea. The second turtle had already started laying. During this process the turtles are in a sort of trance and less likely to be interrupted, so we were able to approach her from the rear and watch the eggs being squeezed out. They were dropping with great rapidity and there were probably about thirty of the soft, round, white eggs.

I am now off to bed as I start canoeing on the canal at 5:30am.