Turtle Hatching

Last night, Mom and I went with two people from the hotel to a turtle reserve to watch the mother turtles lay their eggs. When we first got there, it was starting to get dark, and the guides gave us red plastic sheets to cover our flashlights. Turtles can't see the red light, so it won't distract them when you shine it at them. We went down the short path to the beach, where it was pitch black. There, they had a hatchery with baby sea turtle eggs. In each nest, there were about 80 eggs. There was one little turtle that was already hatched, and we watched it walk around. They were going to let him go to the water by himself tonight. After we were done with the baby sea turtles, one guide went down one side of the beach while the other guide to the four of us the opposite way. The total length of the beach is about 3 Kilometers, so we probably walked about half of that, about a mile. It was so dark that we couldn't see anything. It was impossible to believe that we could spot a sea turtle. When we got to the end of the beach, there was a muddy river. The guide on the other end of the beach called and said that he had seen two turtles floating down his river, but they were already gone. We waited a while at our river, but there weren't any turtles. We decided to head back. The only problem with the whole trip so far was that our guide didn't speak any English, and we couldn't understand her Spanish because she talked so fast. She had actually seen turtle tracks on the way to the river we later learned, but we couldn't understand her. She took us to the tracks, and at the top of them was a mother Olive Ridley turtle! She weight about 50K, and was beautiful. She had already started digging her hole, but it wasn't that big. When the English speaking guide came to us, he said that it took about one hour for the female to dig her hole, lay the eggs, fill in the whole, and crawl back to the ocean. As the mother got more and more tired digging her hole, the guides let us help her. She had a special routine to digging, and we had to be careful or she would either hit us with her flipper or spray us with sand. It was incredible how smart she was. Finally, after she was done digging, she laid her eggs. There were 120 in total, each coming out one, two, or three at a time. It smelled really, really bad. She was breathing really hard by then, and I felt bad for her. She then dug her hole back in, with a little help from us, and it was back to the ocean. The walk to the ocean was probably the quickest part of the whole process. After that, she was gone. We walked back to the reserve center on the beach, and helped the little baby sea turtle go back to the ocean. He used the light of the moon to guide his way, and sometimes he got a little bit mixed up. Finally, the waves took him out to sea also.

1.  The mother Olive Ridley turtle laying her eggs.
2.  A baby Olive Ridley turtle ready for the ocean.
3.  After a turtle lays her eggs and returns to the ocean, the volunteers at the reserve collect the eggs and bring them to the nursery to hatch; then they release them into the wild.