Tribewanted: Vorovoro

So, after 4 trips to Fiji in the past few years, the result of being unexpectedly taken by the TribeWanted experience and all of the amazing people I’ve come to consider family, I felt it was time for a change. And, having been lucky enough to see a rare and rapidly disappearing Leatherback turtle a few years ago, I decided to find a program in which I could do some conservation work to help the declining population. The Endangered Wildlife Trust is a British registered charity established in 1989 specifically to purchase 800 hectares of tropical rainforest on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. This became the Pacuare Nature Reserve.

http://www.turtleprotection.org/

For those who do not know the majesty of the Leatherback, they have been around for 150 million years, and they look as pre-historic as they must have seemed when the dinosaurs roamed. They return to the same beaches for nesting centuries on end, and they nest 6-8 times in a season, laying between 40-100 eggs per nest. With all of that, only 1 in 1000 eggs become mature turtles. The rest are prey to birds, land crabs and poachers or die in the deep sea often as a result of the destructive fishing practices being used globally. Long line fishing means many turtles get caught on giant lines of hundreds of hooks or, as one turtle that came up the beach with huge gashes in her shell, propellers make them vulnerable to death or disease.

What does this mean for volunteers? Patrols of 4-6 hours up and down the beach starting from 9pm, 11pm or 1am in search of turtles coming up to nest. When you find one, you wait until the turtle digs her nest with her back flippers, about a meter in depth, and then, wearing latex gloves to protect their skin from any toxins like Deet in bug spray, work to carefully relocate the eggs to another nest, after taking measurements and tagging them, if they don’t have other tags. All of this data is then shared with international scientific databases. The reason to move the nest is twofold:

Even though we camouflaged away all the tracks (which look like huge 2 meter tractor tires) to make it harder for poachers to steal the eggs, it is easier to disguise a new nest to keep it safe. The location is then triangulated and watched until 60 days later when the nest is due to hatch.

Also, with the rising of the tide as a result of global warming, the beach area for laying is narrower, which risks the nests getting damaged with salt water. If the water gets in, the egg shells will degrade, increasing the chance they won’t hatch. And, a temperature difference of a few degrees can determine how much of the nest is male or female.

The work was exhausting but so rewarding. The wonder of seeing these enormous creatures (on average just under 2 meters long shells) emerge from the waves in the moonlight or holding one of their back flippers while she lays her eggs is like nothing else I have experienced. I spent 5 of my seven nights patrolling the beaches with groups of various sizes (one night down for resting, and one to make sure I could get up at 5am to head into the jungle to see the monkey studies being done). There is a north camp, which is smaller and watches a shorter stretch of beach, but it’s surreal and fun to walk the 3.5 kms up the beach to meet up with them in the middle of the night before resting, having a snack, and heading back to the south camp.

The Reserve also sits along a primary growth rain forest that is returning to its natural state, after small plots of farming had been carved out of it. There is an incredible number of animals that make their home here, from sloths to frogs of every color and croak to monkeys being studied by a primatologist and her field assistant. The rare Agami Heron also has one of its largest nesting areas in the forest here, and I can safely say I have never seen such a majestic creature, 100 nesting pairs all perched in trees along the lagoon.

Overall, I’m so glad I spent time at the Reserve and had the unique opportunity to spend time with the Leatherbacks, and I would highly recommend this program to anyone considering something like it, but it did make me appreciate the unity of vision and camaraderie that is so special about TribeWanted. And, while I know I will continue to travel the world and expand my understanding of our impact on the animal and plant life with programs like this, I’m starting to plot trip number 5 back home to the island…

More photos from the Pacuare Reserve here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=79967&id=713193058&l=5062a351ea