September 12

What a roller coaster day for turtle stories.

First the big drop at the beginning of the ride, the one that always sends your stomach plummeting. Found another poached turtle on a nesting beach we call Fridge, on the West Coast. She was freshly butchered, a fly-ridden and sticky trail of blood and guts scattered around where they had attempted to bury her head and carapace in the sand. Cedric and I discovered the body while on Morning Patrol. It started with a long, thick drag mark in the sand, much like the one I had found almost a month ago while on tour with a group of Germans. This one was different though – the hunters had tried to hide their tracks, and it took a bit of CSI-style investigation to eventually discover the crime scene. (I credit – or blame – my sister for the dorky reference).

To start with, the hunters had attempted to hide the turtle’s track up from the water’s edge. They had dragged a big, heavy piece of commercial ship rope up over the trail and dumped the rope at the top, effectively making it look like some kind soul had simply intended to move the rubbish off the beach. Unfortunately for the poachers, I am neither stupid nor unobservant. They had probably been less-than-sober, or at least incapable of walking straight lines, because the drag mark of the rope did not come straight up the turtle track, and in the curves of the rope mark, I could still see the up-track of the turtle underneath. An up-track with no down-track is bad.

Second, the hunters had gone to the trouble of picking up and carrying the heavy mother turtle a distance, so as not to leave a drag mark on the lower part of the beach where it would be easily noticed in the harder, wetter sand.

But carrying a 120 kilo turtle leaves pretty heavy footprints. We know the difference.

I followed the unusually deep footprints further up into the soft sand of the dunes, and there, sure enough, was the blatant, distinct drag mark of a turtle that had been carried off. I remember running up the track. Even though it was 8am already, and the odds of finding the turtle stressed out but alive at the top of the track were greatly diminished by now, I still had to run – out of adrenaline, anticipation, anger, I don’t really know. The drag mark ended in blood-soaked brush growing low on a dune almost completely at the back of the beach. There were turtle insides strewn about, and un-laid eggs that had been later picked clean by crabs. They hadn’t even let her nest first before taking her.

They had also tried burying the body, but turtles are no small trinket to hide in the sand. It was obvious where they had stuffed her. It was horrendous having to dig into the freshly-turned up sand, feeling her carapace below my fingers and knowing she was gone. We brushed the sand away from what was left of her carapace, plastron, and head. Then Cedric found her severed flippers tossed into the bushes. She had tags. They were from the organization on Boa Vista – Natura 2000. That turtle had possessed an identity, probably a name. Janice even found a knife they had used, complete with a perfect, bloody fingerprint on the handle. The police were called. They came out. Then they did nothing.

In the first year, when Jacquie and Neal were starting to get things together to found SOS Tartarugas, more than 90 turtles were known to have been killed. Their empty carapaces used to litter the beaches here. This year, we have only lost six that we know about. Even though we can celebrate the victory of this massive decline in illegal hunting, it’s never exactly joyous to find another dead turtle. It was particularly frustrating because I was supposed to have been on patrol that night, but my partner – a volunteer from the community and not someone living in Turtle House – had never shown up, and since we are not allowed to patrol alone (for obvious reasons), no one had been out on the beach after 1am that night. One could still argue that they may have taken her anyway. The beach we patrol on the West Coast is 5km long, and it is entirely feasible that they may have grabbed her from one end while they knew we were on the other. But a part of you just feels like you will never know.

Still, that night, the turtle gods decided to recompense, and I had one of the most amazing Turtle Tours of the year. I was taking a small group of Spanish visitors out to Serra Negra under an amazingly starry sky. We had no less than five turtles (and one baby) on Serra Negra during the excursion! My record for the year of most turtles seen in one place. We had a turtle there waiting for us when we pulled up, though she soon just turned and went back into the water. We had run down from where the truck had dropped us off to catch a sight of her, just in time to get a good view of her backside heading back into the dark surf. But if our first glimpse had been fleeting, we had not long to wait before a second turtle, much less camera-shy, was spotted wandering around just up the beach, not twenty yards from where we had arrived. We must have run right past her in our hurry to see the first turtle! The second one provided a much more satisfactory show-and-tell, as she spent quite some time wandering around the beach, even starting to dig a nest right in the middle of the natural hatchery we have set up next to the camp (much to the worry of the rangers, who thought she may actually accidentally dig up another nest). She ended up not nesting, even though we were very careful to hang behind her and not frighten her. Perhaps she was just a bit of a show-off.

Less than a half hour later as we continued down to the next bay, my personal turtle record was smashed out of the park when we found ourselves with three turtles on our stretch of beach all at once! I had seen one coming up out of the water further down the beach, and I left my tour group just behind me while I crawled up to check on what she was doing (once a turtle starts laying eggs, we can get close to watch). I looked past the first turtle, and saw a second turtle on her way back down the beach to the sea! When I glanced back to let my group know about the two turtles ahead of us, they were waving at me frantically and pointing behind them. There was another turtle coming up out of the water behind them! Three turtles all in one go! We ended up getting to watch the middle turtle nest, which was also amazing, as it always is. To top off the night, a single little hatchling had emerged from the natural hatchery we keep by the Serra Negra camp, so we go to release him as well, watching the tiny version of the loggerhead turtle waggle his way down the glowing sand into the moonlit sea, as if to let us know that there is ever still hope.

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