It’s baby season!

Like something out of a zombie apocalypse farce, a nightly emergence has begun on the beaches of Sal. Scaly gray miniature turtles with big doe eyes pop out of the ground en masse and make their way across the sand towards the sea with an awkward wiggle that is guaranteed to elicit a melting heart from any witnesses. Hatching time has begun, and those loggerhead turtle nests that we have been watching eagerly for the past couple of months are spouting out the most adorable, stinky creatures you ever did see. Baby turtles are simultaneously utterly precious and uber smelly, and we love them.

Hatching season entails a number of adjustments in “turtle procedure” from the nesting season. While we are still relocating at-risk turtle nests into our hatchery – digging up eggs and putting them into new nests within the safety of the nursery walls – we are now also getting to enjoy the hatching of those nests that went in at the start of the season. It’s as if the “Ding!” on the oven has sounded, and the clutches of eggs that have been cozy under the sand for the past two months are ready to come out. Like dominoes in a chain reaction, the hatching of the first nest has triggered the rest to follow in short order, and we have had hatching nests for several days in a row now, on the beaches and inside the hatchery – sometimes more than one. The majority of the babies emerge from the nest at night and, if they are in situ on the beaches, make their way to the moonlit waves of the ocean to begin a journey we cannot begin to comprehend. Those that come out in the hatchery are quickly released in the same way by the ranger on duty there. However, in most nests, not all of the little turtles make it out on the first go and there will often be a dozen or so still down inside the nest the day after the big rush sends most of their brothers and sisters to the sea. This is when the excavations begin, and they are a lot of fun. In the hatchery – and as often as we can on the beaches as well – we will go into a hatched nest the next evening and open up the egg chamber to pull out any remaining hatchlings and to check out what has happened with any other unhatched eggs inside the nest. Excavations are brilliant because all the tourists lounging on the beach are willing to drop their beers and trashy magazines and come running to see baby turtles. It is when we do some of our best outreach and we get some people really excited about sea turtles and the project. It’s great fun to dig into a nest, feel a wriggling little baby just under the sand, pull him out into the afternoon sunlight, blinking and flapping his little flippers enthusiastically, and to hear the collective “Awwwww” from the crowd – men and women, adults and children alike. We walk the bucket of babies around to let everyone see, occasionally stopping to look in and admire them ourselves. They are hilarious to watch, often flipping each other over onto their backs where they wiggle around frantically for a few seconds until they can flop back onto their bellies and continue their eager laps around the inside of the tub.

We also check out the rest of the science project inside the nest. Often we will find pips, which are partially-hatched babies still stuck halfway in their shells – which makes for a super cute image. Sometimes they are alive still, and we set them aside in a quiet, dark place to see if they can hatch themselves the rest of the way out. Sometimes they don’t make it, but such is nature. We have a few oddities as well. We have already found several albinos this season, but they don’t tend to survive beyond the nest. We had one live hatchling with no flippers, which was heartbreaking, but what do you do with a sea turtle that can’t swim? Last year they found a two-headed baby in the nest, and just a couple of days ago we had a hump-backed wee turtle. I will ever wonder if he/she will make it the 25 years to maturity, misshapen shell and all.

The best nights are when we get hatching nests and nesting turtles all in one shift. On Saturday, Berta and I got to excavate a nest out on the Costa Fragata beach. Eighty-three percent of the nest had hatched (which is a good percentage; we anticipate and hope for around 75 or 80%), and we found just one little baby left inside the nest, right under the soft sand near the surface. He flapped terrifically as we lifted him into the morning light, ready to taste the salt of the sea. We set him on the smooth sand near to where the waves were lapping the beach and he headed off, awkward gait and all, into the direction of the rising sun. Too fantastic.

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