While our planet is plundered by all of us, a few of us wage a war to save it. I was happy to be on the minority side for a night. The volunteers of the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network, Chennai have been walking along a 7 km sea stretch every single night of the Olive ridley sea turtles nesting season. The arribada is roughly from January to March, every year. And the SSTCN team have been doing these walks for about three decades now. One segment of the walk typically starts from the Neelankarai beach and ends near the Adyar estuary. During the weekends, a shortened version of the walk (‘turtle walk’) is open for the general public. And that is how I ended up being on the right side for a night. There were about 20 others like me.
It was around an hour and half past midnight, when we rose up to embark on our walk. We had a good, elaborate sensitisation session prior to that. Just to make us more readily connected to the purpose, the SSTCN team had brought along a group of turtle hatchlings, to be left free in the sea water. These tiny turtles were from the early eggs of the season. It is a sight to witness the struggle and ultimate success of these babies as they crawl the beach sand, and guided by light from the torches of the volunteers as they begin their journey into the vast expanse of water, the sea. In any lot, there is that one smart and strong hatchling that desperately pushes the floor with its flippers, crawls across the damp sand, never loses sight of the light beam, braves the occasional fierce wave that topples it, and finally takes to the seawater and swims freely towards the horizon. At a deeper level that baby turtle took me to the realm when one brave and curious ape, very hesitatingly yet in need of something, left behind its group, got down from the tree branches and touched the land for the first time.
The sea turtles have a strong bonding with their places of birth, as wherever they swim, when it comes to the question of forming a nest and having children the females return to the very same nesting ground — from where it all began for them. I will be happy to welcome back the lucky ones from this lot.
These turtles are almost at the top of the food chain of the seas. They do get eaten up often by someone superior and hungry lurking under the salty, warm tropical waters. But the natural survival rate of oliver ridley turtles is abysmal, as only the luckiest one among one thousand hatchlings grows into an adult. These creatures also need ample doses of luck to escape the hands of humans that stretches into the seas. During the course of our walk, we came across a stranded carcass of a turtle. Most likely it got dragged by a fishing net under water for hours that did not make it possible for the olive ridley to come up for a breath of air. And eventually killed it.
More worrisome is the danger the shore line holds. One of us asked the SSTCN guys, ‘Are these Olive ridley turtles some endangered species or what?’. The reply was steeped in philosophy, though it was most practical and sensitive answer we could have wished for. ‘Other than the humans, all species on this planet are endangered’. Other than the usual suspects like stray dogs and poachers, the Chennai coast offers the nests the added problem of ‘development’. At some places along the coast, housing apartments are so close to the beach that you get a feeling perhaps these concrete giants were present even before the beach came into existence. As they break their shells from the inside, instinctively the baby turtles move towards light sources. In this part of the world, it could be the flood lights on the beach road, fancy lamps dangling from sea shore bungalows and light from the fishermen’s settlements abetting the high tide limits. In other parts of the world there are debates on the need for conservation of these turtles, and the efficacy of the efforts. It is fuzzy. Here, the response served with philosophy we got should serve as the lighthouse.
Once a while, our lives long for the presence of people who have surrendered themselves to higher purposes. I was lucky to have met a few such souls in one night.
The volunteers move with a single point agenda. To locate the underground nests and move the eggs to safe zones. These turtles come up the shores, make sub terrain conical nests, lay eggs that could be roughly around one hundred in number, cover up the place with beach sand, and dive back into the deep seas. The trained eyes are able to spot the underground nests by tracking the flipper imprints on the beach sand. Once identified, the experts deduce the exact depth at which the eggs are incubating, free of care for the world above them. Systematically, the nest is dug up and the eggs are collected. These eggs have soft, malleable shells. It is kind of surreal and strange to our fingers that are used to those eggs that need steel spoons to tap and break their shells. Soon, the spherical eggs are moved to a protected, natural hatchery on the same shoreline so that they don’t feel out of place.
In due course, the tiny babies that emerge are guided into the sea. And the cylce of life is made to go round — for one more time.
