Turtle Nesting

            Near the equator, the dark comes early. The blazing sun mercifully slips below the glassy gray Pacific at around 6:00 p.m., and that is the time of change. The air cools down, animals come out of hiding and, during the months of December and January, leatherback turtles return to the beaches where they were born. These enormous reptiles, some weighing close to 2000 pounds, have roamed the seas of the world for over sixty-five million years. They migrate from the warm Pacific all the way up to the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle and back again. These biological marvels can dive to depths of 1200 meters and stay submerged for hours while withstanding over three thousand pounds of pressure per square inch of their bodies. Imagine the full weight of a Volkswagen Beatle on your toe and then imagine what it would be like to have that weight on every square inch of your body! They swim in water whose temperatures vary from below 40 degrees F.  to well above 80 degrees and, most amazing of all, they lay their eggs where they were born. It was late December 2001 when I witnessed the miracle of a leatherback turtle nesting on Playa Grande, Costa Rica.

            A huge globe of a moon rose slowly in the darkening sky and cast a silver sheen on the placid ocean. The air was still and the white sand sparkled and squeaked under our horses’ hoofs. Bugs had quieted, birds were resting, and we led our horses to a grove of coconut palms where we tied them. “If we’re lucky,” Jaime whispered, “we might get to see some leatherbacks nesting tonight. We’ll leave the horses here, sit on a log close to the high tide line and wait. It may take a while, but we can’t talk or move around. Voices or the slightest vibrations on the sand will frighten the turtles and they’ll return to the sea without nesting.” And so we sat, our bare feet snuggled cozily in the warm sand, and the sweat of the day crystallizing on our foreheads in the cooling breeze.

Long ago, before gringo surfers carelessly littered Costa Rica’s pristine coastlines and before commercial fishermen crisscrossed the Pacific’s waters with a tangle of endless nets, way back when only bands of monkeys played in the trees, sleek silent snakes hunted in the jungle’s undergrowth and flocks of scarlet macaws cruised the skies, thousands of leatherbacks nested on the warm, sandy beaches of Playa Grande. The old timers tell of nests on top of nests and a beach black with turtles crowding and crawling on top of each other.  But that was long ago and now, just in the past twenty years, their numbers have dwindled from around 115,000 females to a mere 25,000. Boat propellers, ocean litter, netting, and the belief that their eggs have aphrodisiac qualities have put leatherback turtles on the road to almost certain extinction.

 Slowly, as the woods behind us darkened, strange sounds caught my attention-- a high pitched scream here, a rustle in the dry leaves there, and the hum of cicadas rising and falling seemingly on command from some invisible conductor. My eyes scanned the water’s edge hoping to see what we had come for.

            Finally, oh perhaps thirty or forty minutes later, “Look!” Jaime whispered as he put his hand on my back, “Here comes one!” and he pointed way down the beach. The moon now peaked over the trees and would guide the turtles to their destinations far above the high tide line. There in the distance a huge, black figure appeared in the surf. She floated slowly on the incoming tide, gaining a few more feet with each wave until she was finally on land, beyond the safety and familiarity of her natural habitat. Performing a ritual dating back to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, this reptile dragged herself slowly beyond the reach of the water’s high tide line. Her powerful front flippers propelled her forward while her massive back flippers gouged the sand and left deep tracks. My heart beat excitedly and I longed for a closer look! “Once she starts digging her nest,” Jaime whispered, “we can go over and watch. Turtles fall into a trance when the digging starts and at that point they are oblivious to their surroundings.” So we waited and watched and thought about this endangered animal that had been swimming freely for perhaps twenty or thirty years and just now was returning to her birthplace to lay eggs. What instinct, what mysterious guidance system brings these turtles back to the exact point of their origin!

            “O.K.,” Jaime whispered, “She’s digging. Follow me,” and we tiptoed silently across the sand. Palm trees stood like sentinels at the edge of the beach, falling coconuts thumped now and then, and the lapping waves glittered with phosphorescent organisms as they tumbled and rolled to shore. We approached the nesting turtle reverently, knelt down with bated breath, and watched. Her sandy, wrinkled head was the size of a human’s, and her large eyes were unfocused and distant. A thick, massive body stretched maybe two meters and she lay like a beached whale on the dry sand-- a gentle giant with a mission. Though her body, front flippers and head were motionless now, her back flippers moved in an ancient, instinctive rhythm. Slowly, purposefully, she’d scoop the sand with her right flipper, swing it off to the side and flip it away. Then the left flipper swung in, scooped up some sand, and flung it away. Right flipper, scoop, swing, flip. Left flipper, scoop, swing, flip; right, left, right, left. Each time the hole under her short thick tail grew a little deeper and the sand a little wetter. Finally, having displaced about thirty inches of sand, she stopped digging, rested for a few minutes and then began to deposit clusters of wet, leathery, golf ball sized eggs. A leatherback female lays about eighty eggs, but only about sixty of them contain turtle embryos. The others contain water to keep the nest moist as the baby turtles incubate. Once she was finished laying the eggs, she reversed her digging behavior. Using her strong back slippers, she scooped the loose sand up one flipper at a time, dropped it into the nest, patted it down, and continued this process until the hole was filled in. “We need to give her space now,” Jaime whispered. “She’ll come out of her trance, smooth out the surface where she has been laying, turn around and head back for the water. We don’t want to frighten or disorient her. Sometimes these turtles will head for streetlights or unfamiliar noises and they’ll end up far from the ocean.

            Knowing only one in a thousand leatherbacks grow to maturity, my vision blurred as we headed back to our horses. There were no more words on the beach that night; and later, as I floated on my back in the warm waters of Patrero Bay, a few puffs of clouds and a multitude of stars overhead, I reflected on the marvelously mysterious event I had witnessed earlier that evening. It was a humbling reminder that I am destined, as we all are, to comprehend a mere sliver of reality.