Baby Turtles. BABY TURTLES.

The Saturday after Christmas, my family and I headed to the beach to meet up with friends for a service event I had helped my friend Regina organize.

Me and Regina

The service event involved busing in children from the inner city who lived in orphanages/children's centers and bringing them to the beach to learn about the environment, learn about their responsibility as citizens, clean up trash off the beach, play at the beach, and eat a picnic lunch.

Jeff, my dad, Alice, and Gordon looking for trash to remove from the beach.

Receiving instructions

Let the competition begin! 

The boys and girls were competing to see who could collect more bags of trash.

As we moved down the beach, we discovered a surprise!

You may think that those are ping pong balls, but no! Those are olive ridley sea turtle eggs! And they should definitely NOT be visible.

I am not a sea turtle expert, but I had seen leatherback sea turtles lay eggs twice, and I knew the eggs should be buried in the sand, hidden from predators. So we did the best we could.

The eggs were buried again, but I worried about the tide, because the location of this nest was not ideal. As you may have noticed three pictures ago, the nest was right on the edge of a sort of sand shelf made from the tide, so I wanted to ensure that the waves wouldn't come in and wash the eggs away. So I put pieces of wood on it.

And then I called it a day, hoping that the eggs would make it, that the wood would keep the sand somewhat intact, and that no one would discover the nest. There are many predators who love to eat sea turtle eggs.

A month passed, and I thought a few times about how I should return to the beach and see how the nest was doing, but life was busy and time went on, and I never made it back to the beach.

I meet a few times a month with the Latinas in Libreville group. They are kind enough to humor me and allow me to attend even though I am not technically a Latina. Oh, but how I LOVE Spanish. The Latinas usually meet at restaurants or our homes to have a chance to speak in Spanish, but this week one of our members invited us to take a walk on the beach, beginning at her beachside home. I was looking forward to it, but then I received a call from the school. My son had forgotten his swim bag, and it would have been the third time he had forgotten his swim bag, and that's a lot of missed swimming lessons, so I packed his swim bag and got in the car. I ended up being thirty minutes late to Latinas, so my friends had already started walking. I decided to try and find them, but I didn't know whether they had gone right or left from her house.

I did not find my Latinas, but I did find an acquaintance. I had met him at an earlier beach trash clean up with the Francophone/Francophile group. He is an American who has lived here for five years, and he has a passion for sea turtle preservation. He walks the beach almost every morning very early to look for fin prints to find where mother turtles laid their eggs, and then he continues walking to check on the nests' safety and clean up trash nearby. Then after enough time passes, he starts checking the nests very early in the morning to see if there are broken egg shells, disrupted sand, and little fin prints leading back to the ocean. He tries to keep the trash cleaned up around the nests, so baby turtles don't get trapped in plastic bags or stuck behind barricades of discarded water bottles. Sometimes he restructures the sand a bit if it is being destroyed by rain water runoff, etc. Then when the eggs have hatched, he looks for baby turtles who might have ended up stuck in trash or foliage or drainage ditches or people's swimming pools. Then he rescues them and releases them to the sea. (Quite an amazing man.)

I walked with him, asking lots of questions about turtles and snakes, because I really have snakes on my mind right now, and after a while he told me we had reached the point where he usually turns around. I asked him if he minded going a little further, because then we would be at the nest that I had buried the month prior. He agreed, and we trekked on, and then my heart broke a little.

We saw this.

Most of the wood had floated away, the sand was completely intact and smooth, and I was just devastated that my efforts had been in vain. I gasped and said, "Oh my goodness! The baby turtles are all dead!" And then—and THEN—and then I saw a twitch. And I said, "maybe one of them is still alive. Let's get it to the water!" And then we saw another small movement. The movements were so small, so weak. My friend said it was worth a shot to try and rescue them. He also said that in his five years of combing the beach for sea turtles, he has never seen anything like this. The turtles hatched out of their eggs, yet did not dig themselves out of the sand.

As we started gently removing the turtles from the sand, they started getting more active, and then we discovered more turtles under the sand, more than what you see in the hole in that picture. (I also discovered that my friend is much better at handling sand and digging out sea turtles than I am.)

We ended up placing about fifty baby sea turtles next to the waves. They laid there, and then once a wave washed over them, they perked right up and crawled into the sea. They weren't dead! I don't know why they were initially so lethargic, but they were alive!

My friend mentioned that sea turtles usually crawl to the ocean at night, because the darkness provides cover from predators, the moon's reflection on the water guides them, and the lack of sun protects them from getting sun burnt. Then he suggested I take a few turtles home, so my children could see them, and then we could release them that evening, and those turtles might have an even better chance at survival. I thought that was a great idea, so I kept seven in the bucket we had been using to carry them, and I took them home.

I have never been a cooler mom than I was that day. My kids were IN LOVE with those baby sea turtles. I was nervous about keeping them out of the ocean, because I worried they would die during the day, like maybe they were hungry and needed to be in the ocean to find food, but my friend reassured me that they should be full for a while from eating the egg yolk, and actually, the babies just got more and more active as the day went on, rather than becoming more tired. They were climbing all over each other and up the sides of the bucket. Frisky little fellows really! They would crawl right off of your hands if you weren't careful.

I got to thinking that maybe some of my friends would find it pretty cool, so I called a few friends to see if they and their kids would want to see the turtles and help us release them that evening. (Friends, I'm so sorry that I didn't call you! I love you. I couldn't call everyone!) It ended up being seven families with the seven turtles, so each family had one turtle who they named and released. (My family turtle was called "Collett"—it was the only name that all four of my kids agreed they liked. Ha!)

And one by one, we released our sea turtles and watched them crawl their way back into the ocean. It was a beautiful way to spend a sunset. I really can't describe it, but it was truly magical.

I'm somewhat floored when I think about the fact that I have only been to that section of the beach three times in our year and a half here. I went there the first time and buried a nest of exposed eggs. Then I went again and just happened to be there on the day when the eggs had hatched but the turtles had not left the nest. And then I went back again to release baby sea turtles into the ocean. Could that be chance? Coincidence? It honestly feels providential with a capital P.

I am so incredibly grateful for that experience and for being able to share it with friends.

*Some of these photos were taken by friends, because my hands were busy holding turtles! Thank you Vickie, Jess, Jason, Tim, Stacey, and Yuri for sharing your pictures with me.