Day 16 More Turtleness

I really wanted Andrea to be able to see turtles laying or hatching while she was here and following a tip from one of the gals at the ARA Parrot project we decided to stop by Corazalito Beach on the way home. Great decision! We hadn’t even gotten to the beach proper from the truck before we saw in the light of our flashlight, the bulk of a female Olive Ridley turtle lumbering up towards us in search of a spot of beach to lay her eggs. We sat down next to her and watched as she used her hind flippers to excavate a really deep hole in the warm sand. This process takes much longer than you might expect and as we were patiently observing in the dark (so as not to disturb her) I briefly turned on my flashlight to check the process only to see another turtle heading straight for Andrea and only a few inches from her!
She jumped up to get out of the way and with a sweep of the light saw that we were surrounded by turtles: coming up the beach, digging in the sand, laying eggs and heading back. There were turtles everywhere! In fact we discovered that there were so many turtles laying on the same stretch of sand that other turtles had utilized on previous nights that as this night’s turtles dug their nesting holes, they were digging up previous nests of turtle eggs. Ping pong ball-like turtle eggs were flying along with the sand and again I couldn’t help wanting to interfere with nature by returning some of these eggs to a nest where they might survive. We tucked as many eggs into the new nesting holes as we could before deciding that our ideas of what should or shouldn’t happen to those eggs was not our choice to make.
We had the honor of seeing our original mother lay her eggs and then watched in amazement as she filled it in with her flippers and then rocked her shell back and forth, slamming it on to the sand to tamp it down. The hard thumps resonated through the sand and into us and if you listened you could hear the same sounds all the way down the beach.
As she headed back down to the water’s edge, we carefully moved around the beach avoiding dozens of nesting turtles and soon came upon hatchlings too. There were mother turtles coming out of the sea, tiny hatchlings heading for it and spent turtles following in a moving turtle carousel on the night beach.

The only picture I took since we were trying really hard not to disturb the nesting turtles with cameras or lights.