Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur

PART I

ATLANTIC

ANGELS OF EDEN

Trinidad

Welcome to Matura, the night-darkened sign had said, Home of the Leatherback Turtles. From the sleeping village on Trinidad’s northeast coast we drive a jungle-curtained dirt road sparked by fireflies. Scott Eckert, his face framed by a short, graying beard, grips the steering wheel as we bounce along the ruts and roots of a place he loves. Rain-forest trees silhouetted by a half-moon line the sky. Above, a see-through veil of cloud is scudding across the lunar wedge. Where forest yields abruptly to palms dancing in the warm breeze, surf rumble overtakes the trilling jungle.

Rounding a turn and arriving finally at the beyond of nowhere, I’m surprised to see school buses parked around an open-sided rain shelter. If we’ve left the world behind, so have about 150 other people—many teens and children among them—hoping also to see a giant nesting sea turtle.

Coming immediately to greet Scott is a slender, dark-eyed twenty-five-year-old man named Abiraj Rambaran. He works with the group Nature Seekers, which organizes these outings. Youngest of tonight’s Nature Seekers is eight-year-old Chantel, whose braids emerge from under a red baseball cap. She’s with her grandmother Savita. On the dark beach the mist in my light beam comes thick with the sea’s scent. A stiff breeze is blowing.

When Christopher Columbus got here he thought he had found the portal to Eden. He’d dedicated his third voyage to the Holy Trinity, and when he sighted a large island with three peaks—Trinidad—it seemed surely a sign. Columbus wrote, God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth… and he showed me where to find it. In the Gulf of Paria he found the sea freshening. An overwhelming sense of miracle must have attended an island bearing such obvious signs of heavenly guidance and a sea turned to freshwater. Columbus apparently believed Earth was shaped like a woman’s breast, with the Garden of Eden where the nipple might be and a great river flowing from it. Columbus’s crew had never seen a river the size of the Orinoco, and its ocean-diluting flow convinced Columbus that the Garden of Eden lay near at hand. Columbus named the large landmass Tierra de Gracia—Grace Land. We call it South America. Columbus thought this realm was God’s paradise on earth.

Above an ocean black but for the foaming surf, distant lightning flashes. Four people are patrolling somewhere on this miles-long beach for nesting giant Leatherback Turtles.

Last night, no turtles appeared. High wind and high surf discourage turtles from approaching shore. Leatherbacks are heavy enough to come down hard, so they tend to stay away when the surf is cracking wild. Tonight’s surf remains rather heavy, with a rolling roar and foamy breakers. Most Leatherbacks arrive here before two A.M. It’s already midnight, and no turtles.

Scott optimistically incants, Any minute now.

Rain begins. I pull up my rain-jacket hood and turn my back to the wind. Heavy rain also keeps turtles off the beach here; they don’t like muddy, brackish water flowing from the rivers. Abiraj says, Normally, the beginning of turtle season is the dry season. Usually the beaches are very wide then. But this year it’s been raining the whole time, very bad erosion. I’ve never seen weather this strange.

The beach is squeezed between a restless sea and the coconut palms and dense jungle. Where high-reaching surf pins us against the vegetation, we time the wave’s retreat and then run before the next wave. One of these breakers could knock a person down. Rough and dark as the surf is, we proceed carefully.

A volunteer patroller greets us with news of an arriving female, far down the beach.

Her tractorlike track leads from the surf up to dry sand and shadows, revealing her whereabouts. The sight of her is sufficiently astonishing to strike a deep gasp into my ribs. The word turtle is vastly inadequate for this dark monster, breathing before me like a sudden remembrance of a world before memories.

Her proportions impress me as surreal, counterfeit, yet so imposing as to banish all doubt of the fact of her. Most of her shell is dusted with sand, making her look sugar-coated, an eight-hundred-pound confection, long as a man and thigh-high. Lying like a just-crashed saucer from the other side of darkness, with those huge splayed flippers, she seems wondrous as a fallen angel. She seems impossible.

Lured and shipwrecked by the hazards of maternal devotion, she lies quietly marooned. From the exertion suggested by her groundbreaking tracks, from the weight and gravity of her—and merely that she has paused, exhausted, atop the incline of the beach—her arrival seems an act of defiance, a tribute to everything that rises and persists against all reason.

Soon, her stillness stirs. She begins the odds-defying task she was born to perform. She brings her front flippers up and forward like the wings they are to her, twists them like propellers, and chops down vertically, straight into the sand. Now her wings are shovels, sand plows. She pulls back sharply and flings a shower of beach behind her. Thus she begins her body pit; this is how she clears the site and settles down, embedding herself into deeper, moister sand.

Each female encounters a different set of challenges every time she hits the beach. She may come in where the beach is too steep; she may come on the wrong tide; she may arrive where the beach is too narrow; she may ascend to find a wrack line obstructed with drift logs and trash—or a man with a machete.

I’m grateful for the moonlight. She’s a surprisingly leather-bound beast: no scales, not on flippers, head, even shell. There isn’t that turtlehardness. Her wide, winglike foreflippers, each three-quarters her body length, span fully eight feet or so. Very different are her rear flippers: palmate like hands, for sculling and ruddering. A bridge of soft skin conjoins her rear flippers and her short tail like one integrated assembly. Notwithstanding its long meridian ridges, her back is smooth as the taut skin it is. The rear of her shell attenuates to a narrow, projecting point, serrated like the blade of an aloe plant. Her head and neck are massive, the size of a soccer ball.

Getting down onto my belly in the sand, my chin resting on clasped fingers, I am low and dark, still as a beach log. A few feet away and toward her rear, I don’t seem to be disturbing her at all.

She deepens the pit by flinging sand with powerful strokes of her oarlike foreflippers—showering me—then clearing and pushing additional sand with her rear flippers. Her shoulders flex as she pivots closer and the ridged leather-bound shell pauses very near me. She stops and blinks away thick, gelatinous tears. She inhales, then continues chopping farther into the beach and flinging back more sand.

In the water she was weightless and buoyant. Here she suddenly weighs nearly half a ton. Her exertions reflect unaccustomed inner pressures. Every few minutes she rests for a few deeper, heaving breaths, opening her mouth slightly while drawing in a bucketful of atmosphere. Two strong, hard structures protrude from her upper jaw like large canine teeth, while the point of her lower jaw rises in one sharp, upwardprojecting fanglike point that fits between the two canines. Her entire shell rises as she breathes, her rear legs lifting her body like a bellows so air can enter. Each inhalation is a sharp gasp, each exhalation a deep gurgling hushing gush of air.

When her body pit is deep enough to settle her into moister sand, she stops using her foreflippers and rests.

Now, with her rear flippers flattened to surprisingly wide spades, she throws sand until she has a foot-deep hole directly under her tail. Her motion changing again, she next begins carefully lifting palmfuls of sand from the deepening chamber, depositing them gingerly alongside her. She’s doing this with her rear flippers, cupping them like hands in mittens, her work unseen and flawless, the work of a blind watchmaker. Quite unlike the stiffened front flippers now helping anchor her in place, the manipulations of her rear flippers are dexterous beyond imagining. They have the exquisite sensitivity of an elephant’s trunk.

I wriggle in closer. She alternates—one scoop of sand with the right rear flipper, then one flipperful with her left—pivoting her body slightly with each alternation so she can deftly maneuver each flipper into the hole. She’s creating a perfectly cylindrical chamber, surprisingly deep, remarkably round. Strikingly, each time she reaches in, her flipper enters the hole with perfect delicacy, never knocking sand from the edge or sides. Nothing in human experience is so skilled while so unlearned.

Two Nature Seekers arrive. We exchange quiet greetings. They radio that a group can be sent to see this turtle (She done body pittin’; she ready to lay de eggs now. Ovah) and continue along down the beach.

Now the hole is about the depth of one whole rear flipper. She again changes technique: reaching in, lifting a cupped flipperful of sand, and flinging the sand outward and forward with a quick snap. It’s a tricky motion and an improbable maneuver.

She’s alternating movement and deep gasps of air, her breathing so labored it’s audible above the surf’s thunder. She steadily digs this cylinder for half an hour—reaching, pulling, flinging, alternating, reaching, pulling—and now she’s slowing, resting more, taking deeper breaths.

I hear voices and turn to see people who’ve found her track from the sea, moving toward us in the dark.

Now with one flipper she is touching, gently and sensitively, the chamber’s interior. With her flipper tips she widens the bottom into a flared flask. Methodically, meticulously, delicately, she curls the fingers of her mitten, shaving one side of the chamber’s base with the tip of one flipper, then using the other, flaring the flask that will receive her eggs. Finally one rear flipper is just dangling, waving in the hole, unable to reach more sand. The chamber is fully as deep as my arm is long.

Two dozen people of widely varying ages arrive, all Trinidadian, led by eight-year-old Chantel and her grandmother Savita. They come amid whispers of astonishment. Chantel sits silently in the sand next to me. Grandma Savita quietly directs the whole crowd behind us, to reduce visual distraction for the giant turtle. Many sit. Scott and Abiraj stand well off to the side.

When all have settled, a boy perhaps seven years old asks, "What is that?"

Grandma Savita replies, That is the turtle.

The perplexed child reassesses the giant before him and responds, "That’s a turtle?"

Carefully Savita directs her small, dim flashlight to the turtle’s posterior. The whole crowd leans forward, their attention directed to the egg chamber.

The people have come with school or church groups from distant villages. Many are repeat visitors. They belie the stereotype that locals in developing countries lack interest in nature.

After a pause of perhaps two minutes come those long-anticipated first eggs. Two fall at once. I quietly move to give others a good glimpse of the eggs filling the chamber. When, in her next exertion, three eggs fall from her into the chamber, it draws gasps from the crowd.

I wonder about our disturbance. But this crowd is the turtle’s best insurance against anyone coming to kill it. In the world as it is, this intrusive, admiring crowd is the price a turtle pays for living. Before Nature Seekers was formed in 1990, poachers killed roughly half the turtles coming to lay eggs in Trinidad (for meat or the ten gallons of oil they can yield). Nature Seekers has shown nesting turtles to seventy-five thousand people in the last ten years, with the numbers increasing. Now nearly everybody in Trinidad knows about their giant, endangered sea turtles. Poaching is much diminished. Nature Seekers is part of the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network, a driving force behind sea turtle recoveries in the Caribbean region.

Each time her tail flexes she pushes out two or three, sometimes four eggs at a time. They seem a little rubbery and a little papery. Turtle eggshells aren’t brittle like birds’ eggs; they’re something between leather and parchment. Incubation takes about two months if the sand is cool, perhaps six weeks if it’s hot. During that time the fertilized cell’s DNA code reassembles the yolk into a sea turtle.

Grandma Savita murmurs to the assembly, If you want to touch the turtle, photograph the turtle, it will be okay now. You’d think egg laying would be the most sensitive and critical part of the nesting process. But while laying, Leatherbacks seem as if in a trance.

In the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, the Leatherback Turtle lost an estimated 70 percent of its worldwide population. One study saw this decline in only fourteen years; it estimated that Leatherback numbers plummeted from 115,000 adult females alive in 1982 to fewer than 35,000 by 1996. A Leatherback’s two main problems are drowning in fishing gear and getting its eggs taken by people, mainly for food and supposed aphrodisiac powers.

Because the decline is steep and deep, the World Conservation Union considers the species critically endangered. But Leatherback fortunes appear quite different in the two main oceans. Good records over several decades from its major rookeries in the Caribbean, Malaysia, and Mexico and detailed records from Costa Rica since the early 1990s tell this clearly: the Pacific Leatherback has crashed from an estimated 90,000-plus adult females living in 1980 to fewer than 5,000 by the threshold of the new millennium, down 95 percent. Conversely, Atlantic Leatherbacks seem generally stable, with some populations clearly increasing now from former lows.

Scott says, We’ve definitely got more turtles compared to what people saw in the 1970s through ’90s. About six thousand different individual females annually use several Trinidad beaches for nesting. Scott reports, Trinidad’s going up; Guyana and Suriname seem stable. The northern Caribbean and Florida population is growing exponentially.

• • •

The skin on her rear flippers is very soft; through it you can readily feel the long, fingerlike bones. Her head feels smooth. Her neck and shoulders are thick, soft, warmer than the sand. Her back feels unyielding under the normal pressure of a human hand; but if you move your finger sideways, you can push the skin over the underlying bones.

Scott says these bones are like little interlocking pieces about an inch in diameter. If you pressed her shell with the flat of your hand, you would actually see the outline of those little bones, he notes. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle under a drape. The Leatherback’s shell is often described as rubbery, but to me it feels more like a smooth, dense pad, like a foam mat. Scratch it with your fingernail, and it’ll bleed.

When about seven dozen billiard-ball-sized eggs fill the chamber, the first of two dozen much smaller eggs fall from her. These strange small yolkless eggs have no embryos. Only Leatherbacks lay them, and it’s not clear what their function is. They may provide air space at the top of the nest, stabilize its humidity, protect against fungus or insects, or provide elbow room for the unusually long-winged hatchlings. Even the experts don’t know.

Each Leatherback averages seven nests in a breeding season, about ten days apart. Though averaging an undistinguished 65 to 85 eggs—in the Pacific and Atlantic, respectively—Leatherbacks’ frequent nesting yields seasonal totals of 450 to 600 eggs, making them the egg-laying champions. (Other sea turtle species nest two to four times, laying about 100 eggs per clutch.) Quite probably, Leatherbacks can produce more offspring in a year than any reptile or mammal; they leave birds in the dust.

The world’s most intrepid reptiles, Leatherbacks prefer ruggedly pounded shores. They like an open-faced, coarse-sand beach with a steep approach fully exposed to direct surf. Such dynamic beaches tend toward change, and many Leatherbacks lose nests to erosion even in good times. Because their beaches are not reliable, they put their eggs in different baskets. One night they’ll nest here, says Scott, next time, two kilometers down the beach, or twenty kilometers up that way. Why would Leatherbacks want a steep, treacherous beach? Possibly their immense size makes it important to avoid getting stranded in extensive shoals if the tide recedes while they’re ashore. Leatherbacks here like to emerge on flooding tides, when the water comes closest to the nesting sites.

Laying completed, she begins pulling sand down onto her eggs with her rear flippers, covering them up. Splaying each rear flipper into a paddle the size of a tennis racquet, she presses this sand in place. She wields these flippers carefully, patting the sand with the dexterity and seeming sensitivity of a hand in a mitten.

Can she have any sense of what she’s done? What mental experience motivates her through these motions, producing eggs she will never even see, hatchlings of which she almost certainly has no inkling? All the activities have to be performed in exactly the right sequence, for exactly the right duration—no more, no less—and with exactly the correct effect. Can she have any idea of the why of any of this? How could she? Doing all this must satisfy an urge, perhaps as do our own appetites and bodily urges; humans know that feeling of being driven by something other than reason. I look for analogies, but there seems no exact parallel in human experience for what might be going on in this turtle’s mind. If there is, then the turtle understands more than I credit her for, and that is entirely possible.

Now, finished patting, she suddenly makes three vigorous power thrusts with her front flippers, throwing sand backward. From ten feet away I can feel the deep thuds on the beach as she swings her flippers forward and slams them onto the shore, pulling back big loads of sand, obscuring her precious deed.

She rests, her throat pumping heavily as she pushes and pulls air in and out of her. Something catches Scott’s eye and he moves in closer, saying, See this? A big pink streak goes around her shoulder and armpit, right where the skin is softest. She might have taken a hook here in the shoulder, and then the line wrapped around her there. Or it might have been longline or lobster gear, but that’s a classic fishing-line scar.

One of our entourage adds that he saw a turtle that had swallowed a section of fishing line with several hooks. She had line all wrapped around her, going down her throat and hooks coming out her rear end.

Scott comments, These old girls really do run the gauntlet out there. He estimates that Trinidadian gill nets alone tangle five hundred to six hundred turtles a year, and he’s beginning to work with fishermen. Of those caught, some are released alive; some drown. Some get taken for meat or oil. Once when he tracked nine Leatherbacks from here, four got tangled in nets—three fatally—before they’d even left Trinidadian waters.

Scott applies disinfectant to the spot he has chosen for attaching a metal tag. He shows us where: You don’t want it in this soft skin at the base of the flipper. You want it out a little farther—here. Then it won’t scrape the side of her body. The U-shaped clip goes snugly around the flipper’s trailing edge. A sharp, triangular metal tooth is designed to come through the flipper into a hole on the opposite side of the tag, and fold securely with help of a clamping tool. Make sure you have the point facing up when you apply the tag, so there’s nothing sharp facing her body when she brings her flippers down along her side.

Scott applies the tag. I flinch as the metal tooth pierces her. The turtle reveals no reaction. It might bother me more than it does her; tagged turtles often return to the same beach. Surely it’s a vast improvement over killing her for meat.

Watching her, and the people, I’m reminded of humans’ strange range of treatment of other animals, our deep capacity for kindness and our equal one for cruelty. Each comes naturally, and each is learned in like measure.

She begins creeping forward, then stopping, turning her whole body this way and that while hurling large amounts of sand to all points of the compass, waving her arms like a child making snow angels. Then she turns and creeps forward a little farther, and flings some more. Not everything airborne is sand; a few coconuts go flying too. Slowly she obliterates the nest’s location until, in the churned sand of a small landscape of bulldozed beach, it’s impossible to see where, exactly, her eggs lie hidden.

Her throat flushes pink with exertion.

About an hour and a half since she first chopped into the beach, her motions change yet again. She stops thrashing, and now there’s no question that she’s headed to the sea. Each pull on her oars propels her forward. She heads straight down the wet part of the beach. Each thrust closes the gap between her and the highest reach of the waves, until finally the waves begin washing around her.

When she was in the pit I didn’t appreciate the massiveness of her girth, because one thinks of a turtle’s belly as flat. Here on hard sand her enormous thickness is suddenly apparent. Stand next to her, and you realize that this barrel-shaped turtle’s back is several feet from the ground.

The swirling suds sweep the sand from her, leaving her shining like a polished stone. Suddenly she is a sleek, dark animal, regaining the cool relief of her weightlessness. The next wave pushes her backward a little, and the following wave pulls her into the sea, almost impatiently, and she is simply gone.

As she strikes homeward toward two thousand miles of blue universe, one impression recurs: she succeeds, deprived of rational thought, as she has succeeded for one hundred million years. Meanwhile I can only stand and spin the wheels of my vaunted reason.

We have word of three turtles widely separated farther along the beach, and we strike in their direction. Approaching the first I see, I realize it is dead. Its skull bears compound fractures, as from a series of sharp blows. It’s an arresting shock with an overwhelming stench.

Scott says, This was poachers. Leatherback adults don’t really have natural predators on beaches. Not anymore, Scott remarks, then gives it more thought and adds, "For a while, their ancestors probably had to contend with Tyrannosaurus rex lurking behind the dunes."

Savita says, in her lilting Trinidadian accent, One turtle is nuttin’; I remember as a child, dis was a prime slaughterin’ place. Now, to find turtles killed like dis, it’s very rare. Now people see de turtles more for tourism, and as representing Trinidad.

Down along the beach, a turtle in the surf summons my attention like something darkly whispered. She pauses. A wave hits her and explodes, as though slamming a boulder. She has emerged where the beach is unusually steep and unusually narrow. If she had arrived farther up or down the shore, she could have pulled herself past the wipe of the highest waves. But here the beach is so pinched between sea and jungle there is no sand above the tide line. A wise turtle would lumber back into the sea and come ashore elsewhere. Instead, she shoves up the short steep beach to where it abuts the vegetation. She has turned, facing the ocean. Her foreflippers and head are on wet, hard sand. Surely she realizes, in that very successful three-ounce brain, that this is not the kind of place a turtle is supposed to dig. But she begins digging. A wave presents its foam just inches from her massive head.

Hands on hips, shaking her head in disapproval, Savita says, "Dis is really sad. Before, it was a good hundred yards to de water. I’ve never seen de beach like dis. Now I don’t know what deez poor turtles are going to do. Is dis going to continue?"

The beach isn’t what the turtles expect. Part of what’s going on may be the rising sea level. Part is weather and lunar cycle. The moon, waxing toward full, pulls the tide higher up the beach each night. The surf is running such high laps it’s undermining the overhanging palm trees, licking the jungle vegetation, and washing out nests, scattering eggs. Parts of the beach now lean at a thirty-degree angle, some spots have a knee-high step cut into them. Certain conclusion: this nest is doomed.

People say this is the way it is with Leatherbacks. But people have been studying them for only thirty years out of over one hundred million. During these recent years, the sea level has been rising, and almost every casual discussion reveals that people have never seen these beaches so eroded.

A wave wets her head and flippers—and the next wave swirls into her egg chamber. Even as the upper hand of each lapping wave slaps her face, she begins laying. Knowing how turtles accomplish such unfathomable and hazardous crossings of space and time to come here, it’s disturbing to watch her squander her fertile fervor in so unsuitable a place. Had she landed fifty yards down the beach she might have salvaged this endeavor. Had she landed right here last year, she might have had no