Turtle season

A sea turtle season to remember

A lot has happened since the last blog post. And I mean A LOT. So where to begin? I’ll probably try to tell our story about the 2022 turtle nesting season in chronological order, even though I might forget a few things.

Let’s start with July!

Earlier in June, Melvin and me decided to double the size of the hatchery as we prepared ourselves for Hawksbill nesting season (this species starts to nest sooner than all the others). Remember: The Eastern Pacific Hawksbill turtle prefers to nest on the small beaches in the Padre Ramos estuary which we don’t patrol ourselves, so we only buy a small portion of the nests while the big majority goes to the other turtle project called “Casa Carey” – those guys have been around for several years already and specialize on the protection of the critically endangered Hawksbills.
Our very first Hawksbill nest was delivered to us on the 2nd of July, and altogether we incubated 17 nests of this species.

Also in July, we received our first intern for the season: Tammy from China who is studying biology in the UK and found out about us through her university. Tammy was super passionate about nature photography and birds, while she had never worked with turtles before. Having lived in big cities for all her life, she was astonished by the clear night sky full of (shooting) stars, and a little bit frightened by all the critters and mammals living on our property. With Tammy, we started going on night patrols and also had some very first encounters with our beloved Olive Ridley turtle – we buried the first nest of this species on the 29th of July.

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Turtle season

Happy lonely times

Timing couldn’t have been more unfortunate when a global crisis halted international travel for many months to come, just about when we were opening our doors.

But I’m not going to cry to you about the severe state we’re all in – I’m here to tell you all the good news that happened this year. Because despite the pandemic, things were going great for us at MEMANTA as we simply kept doing what we love the most.

We collaborated with more people and protected more nests:

This year we collaborated with four young men from the community who would fill our hatchery with nests that weren’t safe on the beach. Those guys are good friends with Melvin and work regularly for us, so there’s a lot of trust involved. They would come up to our house, wake us up in the middle of the night and help to rebury the eggs. However, we also received some nests from random people from the community, which made us especially happy because it shows that there are quite a few guys out there who want to support us.

All in all, we were able to relocate 70 nests during the 2020/2021 season! That’s a total of 7040 eggs – mostly from the Olive Ridley turtle, but also from the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill turtle. It’s a huge increase from last year with only 22 nests.

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nighttime action
Turtle season

Hundreds of turtles – Zero volunteers

A really slow start

When we started our publicity for this years’ volunteer program and received the first messages in February, noone thought that one single person eating a wild animal in China would change the world so dramatically… and maybe forever.

We actually had our first volunteer reservations for June and August when the borders around the world started to close and it got impossible to travel. We even received inquiries when there was a first recovery evident in Europe, but Central America to this date remains closed to conventional tourism and the airlines keep cancelling and postponing their flights.

So we gave up all our hopes for this year.

Our establishments are ready for use, but for now we’re trying to maintain them and keep them fresh-looking for a time when people will be able to travel again.

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Preparation & Construction

Close to the finish line

I know, I know… it’s been way too long since I wrote the last update. But here it is finally, covering everything that has happened between July and October:

 

A BEACH FULL OF TURTLES, AND EVEN FULLER OF PEOPLE

I don’t like to refer to those people as poachers, because poaching sounds like something really bad. And of course, those guys who take the nests from the beach are doing something bad – they are basically killing wildlife. But for most of them it is their only way to survive, the only source of income.
Familys here tend to have up to eight children. Mothers are busy with household chores while the men are trying to feed them all. But how do you manage to do that when there’s no work? We’re in a very remote place where cattle grazing, fishing and growing crops are the only opportunities. But not everyone has enough land, or a boat, to do so – and let’s just remember that these activities also create environmental problems.
So all they can do is take advantage of the natural resources that are readily available.
Of course the local families also eat some eggs themselves, but mostly they sell them to middlemen who then sell the eggs to the markets in the bigger cities. It’s a huge business.

One nest can be worth 20 US-Dollars. That’s a big amount of money in a country where people earn 10 Dollars for a whole day of hard work. So it’s quite tempting to go and look for turtle nests.

Continue reading “Close to the finish line”