Finding the Mama Turtles

Every night, two or three people would walk with Roberto up and down our beach to look for nests or mama turtle tracks. Our presence also deterred the poachers. Usually there were two beach walks, one around midnight and another around 4 or 6 in the morning, depending on the tides. My second beach walk, we saw a mama turtle.

Roberto went up close to check her out, and said that she needed time. So, we kept walking down the beach to check the far side, and then made our way back to her. Roberto went to check on her again and said it was time. Time for what I didn't know, but I was excited!

We slowly walked up to her. She had dug out a nest using her huge arms and legs, and had begun to lay eggs. Roberto handed me two gloves and said, "go ahead." I looked at him puzzled and he motioned for me to remove the eggs from underneath her while she was laying them. He explained that she was in a trance and wouldn't notice our presence. So I slowly brought my hand closer to a small hole, just a bit larger than my hand. Even slower, I started removing the eggs and placing them in a plastic bag. The eggs were soft, wet and warm. As I got used to terrified feeling that the turtle would wake up and be furious at me, I began to remove the eggs a bit faster.

Roberto asked me to stand back for a moment while he tagged her. She didn't even flinch while the metal created a small ring around her right arm. With much less fear, I continued to dig out the eggs until she finished.

There were still about 2o eggs left to get when she started covering her nest, so we had to wait for the mama to cover up her nest with her enormous body and pat it down. Then, she slowly made her way back into the ocean without even a glimpse in our direction. We dug up the nest and put the remaining eggs into the bag. There were just over 100 eggs when we were finished.

In awe of the birthing of 100 turtle eggs, we walked to another place on the beach to dig up a new nest for the eggs. Since it wasn't busy season, we didn't need to put the new eggs in the hatchery. We just needed to rebury them elsewhere so the poachers and predators couldn't just follow the mama's scent right to the nest.

We dug a hole, imitating the mama about as deep as the distance from the tips of your fingers to your elbow, and emptied the bag into the hole. We covered up the hole, using the flat bottom of our forearms, still imitating the mama turtle, and patted it down hard.

Helping the Babies

So I should probably get the point of my trip. The turtles. There was a hatchery just a few steps from our house that we were in charge of monitoring 24 hours per day. When the nests got too hot during the day, we would water them. The reason behind that was never explained to me, since in the wild, the nests were not watered.

During busy season there are so many nests, that the volunteers dig them out and rebury them in this hatchery. Each is surrounded by chicken wire that goes a few inches down into the sand, then covered by these blue or grey tops. This keeps crabs, birds, raccoons and other predators out of the nests. Turtle eggs are not only a delicacy for animals, but also the Ticos. We had to protect the eggs from poachers as well.

Everyone had at least one other person on turtle duty with them, and every couple or trio had four hours per day that they were responsible for the babies. The shifts were divided so that everyone had two hours during the day and two hours during the night. So if you had from 12-2 in the afternoon, you also had midnight to 2AM to check the hatchery. Most of the babies hatched at night.

When the babies did hatch, we would put wet sand into a bucket, pat it down and put the hatchlings inside the bucket. Then we would take the babies back to the same section on the beach that their mama laid their eggs so that the experience would be as natural as possible. (Also, the females come back to the beach they were hatched to lay their own eggs.) The babies were places 100 meters from where the water met the sand. Then, they would slowly make their way to the water. During the night, we couldn't use flashlights to watch this process because the way the turtles know to go into the water is by following the light of the moon reflected off the water. So, our flashlights had a red light filter on them, so it would distract them.

The two times I got to release the babies took about 45 minutes for them to make their way from the sand into the water.

Settling into My New Home

I settled into my room which I shared with four other people. I took the only available bunk, apparently, the reason my particular bunk was available was because it was broken. There was one board that was higher than the rest. The woman on the bunk below me, Rhonda, warned me about the boards on my bed. They had a tendency to fall through in the middle of night and hit her in the face causing the person on top to fall on the person on the bottom. All I thought about my first night was "don't fall, don't fall, don't fall."


Waking up in a new place was a welcome change. I didn't recognize a single voice I heard just outside my room, but they all sounded happy. I guess that's the thing about volunteers, they are all really happy to be where they are.

I joined the new faces at the big table which seems to be where everything important happened, food and meetings. We were informed that the leader of our group, Roy, would be leaving and his return date was unknown. Most of us were pretty surprised, but Roy didn't seem to be concerned about leaving 24 volunteers under the care of Roberto who seemed like the least friendly of everyone. He was a Tico (Costa Rican) who understood English, but hated speaking it because of his accent. He liked to pick-up phrases and swear words from the other volunteers so he would randomly spit out a phrase in English or German. He of course, grew on me, and became one of my favorite people to be around.

Amy and Nick, the veteran couple from Boston, fell into the leadership role quickly. They had been there for over a month by the time I got there. Amy was a first grade teacher back in "real life," so she enjoyed writing the daily chores on the whiteboard. Even more than writing on the board, she loved to clean it or to have it clean. That board must have been 5 or 6 years old, weathering rain and sun, but Amy had it cleaner than the day it was purchased, I'm sure. Nick was a dog trainer which surprisingly came in handy. We had at least one dog, Violetta, around us at all times, and she listened to Nick. Amy and Nick held meetings every morning where we decided what to do during the day.

Just after breakfast every day, we would brainstorm and try to figure out what needed to be done. We did everything from pumping two different kinds of water every day (drinking and non-drinking) to "trimming the trees off the path," which translated to "take this machete and hack away" to sweeping the dirt off the rocks around the table and cleaning the pavement we had around kitchen area. Other days where we got to use paint, build a hang out area and clean up the beach. Two of the volunteers from The Netherlands, Mari and Bart, built a chair out of drift wood.

Every day we had different work, but our schedule never changed. Breakfast, meeting, manual labor, siesta (napping, reading, writing, swimming, tanning), lunch, more work, siesta or shower, dinner, hang out, and of course, someone was always on turtle duty. Some of us took surf lessons with Yerald throughout the day. He was the only one who could get us out of manual labor. He would say that he couldn't control the waves, and when they were good, we had to go.