Baby Turtles

On a random night during third term we made a very last minute decision with some friends that we wanted to drive to the other end of the island to go see baby turtles.  Every year Leatherback turtles come and lay their eggs on Lavera beach.  The turtles are huge, and bury their eggs deep in the sand.  Then they obviously hatch at some point, so we decided that we wanted to see the babies.

 

To get on the beach you have to get a guide because it's protected during the times when the moms lay the eggs and when the babies are supposed to hatch, so you can't get on the beach without someone taking you.  Like I said, it was a last minute decision, so we ended up leaving later than we should have, and it took us longer to get there then we thought.  So those two things coupled together meant that we should have missed seeing the turtles.  But we were crazy lucky, and one of the times after making a wrong turn, someone stopped to ask us where we were trying to go and lucky us, he happened to work for one of the protection agencies and drove us to where we needed to go, and found a guide that would take us.  If that wouldn't have happened we would have made a very long drive for no reason.

 

You go see them at night, so it was really dark while we were out on the beach.  It was such a pretty night, the sky was clear so the stars were amazing, and we had great company.  It ended up being a lot of waiting while a guide went out to see if there were any babies around, but it was worth the wait. 

 

I can't even describe how cute these little tiny turtles were.  They were so so tiny, they didn't seem like they could even be real.  We got to see them try to make their way for the ocean and get swept up in the water.  Some of them got confused and tried to go inland instead of towards the ocean, so we got to help turn those ones back around the right way.

 

It was really hard to see because you can only use red lights so it doesn't hurt their eyes, and the guide only had one small light.  Also, we had to pretty much stay in one spot the whole time because we didn't want to chance moving and hurting one of them because they're so small it's hard to see them sometimes.

 

 

They use their front fins to kind of propel them forward

 

 

We owe a big thanks to Brandon for most of the pictures, and for getting himself drenched for some great shots.

 

It was seriously such a neat experience, we were so glad we did it.  It was really late by the time we got back, I think we all fell into our beds that night totally sand covered but not even caring.