Costa Rica: The Turtle Hatch  
By Jennifer Anthony

An army of tree giants stands guard on either side of the canal’s brackish water, dipping their fingers into its depths. Their leaves display a spectrum of green: celery, Granny Smith Apple, artichoke, boiled spinach. Snowy egrets and roseate spoonbills and black-crowned night herons skim inches above the water, silently, effortlessly. Others make their way along the shore on toothpick legs. A caiman pushes his nostrils above the surface of the water; his swamp-colored eyes, interrupted by a vertical dash of black, are catlike and unblinking. Two boys stand on either side of a raft, rowing themselves across the width of the canal with long sticks. The experience is as surreal as a Jungle Book version of the Venetian canals. It cannot be real; the animals must be planted. I watch boats zip by us on the water and slip into a catatonic disbelief.

I have arrived at Costa Rica’s Tortuguero National Park. I disembark at the lodge and slide into a hammock. My eyelids flutter. But the rainy season’s sudden thunderstorm refuses to be ignored. It pelts the roof with water bullets, dimples the water, can’t decide whether to throw its showers vertically or horizontally. And, just as suddenly, the storm is gone; the slate blue of the sky gives way to oranges and reds and royal purples.

When the colors fade to black, I return to the canal for a scheduled turtle walk on the shores of the Caribbean. A hotel staffer takes us to Tortuguero village’s dock and introduces us to Fernando, our guide. Fernando is of Jamaican descent but was born and raised in Nicaragua. Although his native tongue is English, his accent is thick; and it is often undecipherable. We hop off the boat and march through the tiny town of Tortuguero in the direction of the Caribbean.

Fernando is strict. Before we begin walking across the beach, he lays down the laws: No Pictures, No Smoking. He sets out across the sand at a steady clip on thick-muscled calves and thighs. The sky is the color of ashy coal; the sea is inky black – not at all the colors I naively expected of the Caribbean, regardless of the time. Only Fernando and the other guides on the beach are allowed flashlights, covered with red paper so that the turtles won’t confuse the lights with the whitecaps of the sea. After a few minutes of walking, we detect the shadows of other tour groups behind us; none of the guides walk as fast as ours.

We soldier down the beach. It is no small feat keeping up with Fernando; and we know that his third and unspoken rule is No Complaining. Still a turtle apprentice, I leap up from the sand when I spot two thick, parallel lines, like ATV tire tracks, leading inland from the water. “Turtle!” I exclaim. “Yesterday’s tracks,” Fernando remonstrates, sagely. He points to the gap between the shoreline and the beginning of the tracks.

Onward march.

At last, we come upon fresh tracks and follow them inland to find a female green sea turtle who has finished laying her eggs and is busily covering them with sand. Fernando explains that she weighs as much as 300 pounds and that she could be as young as 25 or as old as 100. She’s dug an enormous hole in the sand and laid as many as 125 ping pong-sized eggs. And now, with the grace of a butterfly, she uses her back flippers to cover up the eggs so that they will be safe for as long as ten weeks, when the baby turtles will hatch. The mother will manage this same feat six times, with six batches of fertilized eggs from six different males, over a three-month period. Nature lets her rest a couple of years before she has to do this all over again.

It would seem that male green sea turtles are afforded an easier life, but neither the female nor the male sea turtle are given a facile passage to this world. All are born buried alive, all must crack open their shell with an egg tooth, all must shove their way out of the hole. And after that harrowing job, they will hustle out to sea, building their muscles as they go so they’ll be ready for the water’s force. Fernando explains that they can be killed along the way by various predators, including dogs and jaguars.

Jaguars?

Fernando claims he has never seen one. But because he has just finished telling us how many baby turtles they eat, it doesn’t seem like such a remote possibility.

We stride onward to find a female who has not yet given birth. By this time, several groups of people have gathered on the beach in silhouetted clusters. At last we find a turtle who is in the process of digging a nest. We sit down to wait the requisite 45 minutes before she is done. She is careful; she takes her time. But after three quarters of an hour, she is unsatisfied with her work. She stops and decides to begin all over again, further down the beach.

Page 1 of 2   Next Page

All contents copyright ©2006 Pology Magazine. Unauthorized use of any content is strictly prohibited.