Thursday, April 16, 2009

Seeing a leatherback by Tom Parsons

It was my last night walk of phase and so my last chance of seeing a leatherback turtle. Late March and up until now there had not even been a sign of any tracks let alone anyone seeing an actual turtle on the beach nesting, so going onto the beach at midnight I didn’t have much hope of finally seeing what we were out there looking for.

Having already walked the length of the beach once, we doubled backed on ourselves to start the second half of the survey. It was at 02:08 in the morning when I saw this sudden movement and reflection in the moonlight just ahead of me on the beach and my first instinct was a little panicked but excited that this is it, this must be a turtle.

It was only when I looked closer that I realised that the movement I had seen was merely the front flipper, and lying about 2m away was this enormous, yet strangely inconspicuous, creature. The turtle had just emerged from the sea and was heading up the beach so we found a good spot about 10m away to wait and see what she did.

Even though we had repeatedly been told how big leatherbacks were it was still so shocking and incredible to see them up close in real life. We were watching her for about half an hour, while she was finding a suitable nesting site and started digging a body pit, but she was too close to the high tide line and was put off from nesting by a large wave that came all the way up to where she was digging and so started returning to sea.

We quickly rushed behind her to see if she had previously been tagged, the thrill of being so close to a fantastic animal was immense and being able to see every inch of such a large turtle was amazing. Although this turtle didn’t actually nest at least I can now go home happy and able to say that I’ve seen a leatherback turtle.
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