Here on Dewees, we wrapped up our turtle season Friday morning with our last nest inventory of the season. We helped protect 1345 baby turtles on our island (including some efforts on Capers Island) this summer. The New York Times published an article this weekend on the “turtle people” of the gulf coast, who participated in a massive effort to rescue and protect sea turtles endangered by the gulf oil spill. (Thanks to regular reader Jim Mack, who sent the link.) The author describes the way that the complicated rescue and relocation effort was successful because of the team of dedicated volunteers already in place. As fellow turtle people, we have gotten regular updates on the efforts in the gulf, but this comprehensive article really explains the scope of things.
The hatchlings from this season’s first nests, however, were on schedule to scramble into the Gulf of Mexico only a few months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, at what looked to be the height of one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history. By June, the sargassum in that part of the gulf was heavily oiled. Soon, it appeared to be largely gone: incinerated in controlled burns, maybe, or hauled up by skimmer boats. And so state and federal wildlife agencies came up with a radical plan. Sea-turtle eggs laid on beaches in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle would be dug up during their very last days of incubation, packed into Styrofoam coolers and shipped to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center on the opposite coast of Florida. There, after hatching, the baby turtles would be released into the oil-free Atlantic. When I arrived in Alabama in late July, tens of thousands of turtle eggs, from hundreds of nests, were already in the process of being relocated — all during a point in their development when even a slight jolt to the egg could be lethal. In short, America was orchestrating the migration of an entire generation of sea turtles, slow and steady, overland, in a specially outfitted FedEx truck.
The government called this effort a set of “extraordinary measures being taken in direct response to an unprecedented human-caused disaster.” And as one U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist told me, “We immediately knew it was more work than we could do on our own.” Fortunately, a vast and well-organized infrastructure of volunteers was already in place: people who, for years, happened to have been honing some of the very skills that the survival of these imperiled animals suddenly hinged on — not because they saw such a crisis coming, but basically because they really loved turtles.
What I found in Alabama was a classic story of ordinary people called to do extraordinary things. But the extraordinary things were so eccentric, and the ordinary people were so unassuming, that it took me a while to realize that. In the middle of an environmental emergency that seemed to demand dispassionate and scientific decision making, it was an emotional connection to turtles — and, in some cases, a slightly overemotional one — that wound up making certain people indispensable.
Do click through to the entire article— it’s fascinating. And to get an entire wrap-up of the Dewees Island turtle season, click the turtle tab on our main page.
