Turtle mothers, turtle babies

Once Upon a time I saw a nesting mother...

We’d only just passed by this spot five minutes ago. Ahmaly and I fell silent and looked at each other.

“Isn’t this what we’re looking for?” I asked the sand in front of me.

“Yes, look they’re tracks” Ahmaly replied, her red torch following this new path up the beach. A distinctive row of flipper pushes and under shell drag lead to the bush line. The smell of firecrackers and rain clung to fresh sea air, our dark red torches bouncing cautiously as we proceeded. She was halfway towards her intended patch of darkness away from the trails of light pollution. 

Excitement boiled inside me as Ahmaly reached for the volunteer phone in her pocket. This was it; this is what we were here for. Lightning strikes lit up the sky as mother Elaine began to dig, the swipe and swoosh of her fins in time with the spraying thud of light sand into the air. Forty-five minutes later, with a waiting nest, she was ready to begin the drop of her brood. 

The old poacher, now paid to help Conservationists, was ready to scoop as the eggs dropped. His efforts would ensure a zero breakage success rate from mother to collector to box to new nest to hatching in 60 days. Six volunteers stood nearby, protectively waiting for the soft balls, silently egging her gargantuan efforts on. She looked exhausted already.

  

The next morning

Six hours later Ahmaly, Daniel and I in a thick black hoody, sat on the speedboat driven by Boy out to Munjor Beach.  The sun was rising over blue waves and a chilly early morning wind caught at my cheeks. Daniel from Singapore, lowered his binoculars from the horizon grinning at my somewhat unnecessary layers. We were about to swim over a reef to a fresh egg nest.

No one ever tells you this, and why would they, but dinosaur eggs are very soft, almost like fabric. You did read that correctly, the word, dinosaur. Turtles are  dinosaurs.  Another mother had laid a new batch on this beach while we had been watching ‘Elaine’ do the same back on Juara beach.  We lay together on our bellies among the trees, burrowing gently, downwards to the nest below, careful not to knock or break any eggs. They were the size of Chinese lucky balls.

“Aarrrgh!” I cried out, feeling the stodgy goo between my fingers. “No!” The shift in sand and my hands on the delicate shell had broken an egg.

Five minutes later I struck misfortune again, unaware that my oafish digits were to blame. Sand crumbled down towards the nestled ping pong balls, exacerbating our efforts. On the third crush, this time from a slump of sand, two more came out dripping yellow yoke. I decided to step back and one by one, two by two, out they came in to the waiting mouth of our poly foam box. The total broken came to rest at five out of 104. Ninety eggs were ready to take to their new address: the Juara Turtle Project hatchery.

This may all seem rather mysterious. Turtles? I thought she was in Thailand? Where the fudge is Tioman any way?! I shall enlighten you. I was staying in Ko Lanta, swishing my toes in the sand of the hostel common area, looking for a… ‘something.’ There it was, Jaura Turtle Project, a place to stay, do and maybe even learn?   On the minibus leaving for the ferry port: rammed in as we were, old ladies cast their inquisitive eyes at these curious foreigners. I am as ever enthralled by Thailand and it's nuances, in fact all of South East Asia. This is a part of the world where dashboard-nodding dogs are replaced by dusted purple nodding elephants that smile back. It is a place where children learn how a Gecko sounds instead of a sheep, with an upwards 'uh' tone to the downwards 'oh', so fun for little mouths to repeat. Half a week later, when the nodding elephant was a memory behind several more bus journeys and a stay on Perhentian Kecil, that incidentally reminded me of Kellerman’s in Dirty Dancing, I held on to the interior of a tiny Jeep careering over an incredibly steep hill. Juara was at the bottom.

Turtles hatching

“Put one on top of the others,” instructed Charlie.

A crowd of us had gathered around the 1ft diameter fenced nest in anticipation.  Just a couple of small nondescript heads were poking out, and a few rings of sand clung in patches where their eyes should be. They had finally reached the fresh air at the top. In a bid to wake them up to their need to get out of the shifting sands around them, we followed his advice. Just the top baby turtle began to shift his flippers in a flurry of fins.  Charlie picked him up expertly by the ‘rails’ of his shell, his little fins thinking they were in water and not suspended in air, and placed his tiny body in the centre of the baby heap. With a sudden great push from below, they heaved upwards as one. It was like watching an erupting volcano or bees leaving a hive en masse in search of pollen. 

They crashed up against the fencing, trying to get to the waves ahead of them. They climbed over and over each other, some falling on their backs with their necks stretching out so they could flip themselves back over; and a few of us motherly volunteers succumbing to a kind of cross species broodiness and picking them up ourselves. And this is definitely a real phenomenon. How else do you explain all those videos of kittens on You-Tube?

When we released them two hours later, a small crowd of families had gathered. Now, beating themselves against the inside of a foam box, they sounded like a crowd of birds flapping their wings against the wind. The evening was at that point where it changes suddenly from light to pitch black. Twilight is especially fast on the equator and this was a blessing for our brood of 200. The box was tipped and the most we could do now was hope they all made it to the sea, not back up the beach or in the beak of a hovering bird, the likelihood of either most certainly swayed by the presence of a crowd of humans. At the same time, a storm was appearing with globs of water greeting us a cool hello. 

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Great swipes now came from the bottom of the great hole Elaine had previously dug. She slowly turned her vortex in to a small ridge, and even slower, after about an hour, she managed to shift her exhausted self and nudge her shell away from the covered nest beneath. I left before she made her about-turn to face the waves. Something told me, besides my own tiredness, staying to watch her return could be a step past the line between impassioned volunteer and intrusive voyeur.  I crept away, leaving her safety to the remaining volunteers.