C’mon, lil guys, you can make it!
A blogpost by Lisa Williams Kline
Yesterday morning, where I walked onto the beach, there was a new sea turtle nest, marked with stakes and orange tape. Sometime the night before, a female sea turtle had crawled out of the ocean, laboriously dug a hole with her rear flippers, and laid her eggs.
Last year there were nearly ninety nests on this beach, and for Mother’s Day, our daughters “adopted” two turtle nests for me. I was thrilled! I walked up the beach, found the nests I’d been assigned, and visited them frequently, but was disappointed to miss the hatchlings’ march to the sea. At the end of the season, I received a nice letter from someone on the turtle rescue team saying that one of my adopted nests had close to 90 live hatchlings who made it to the sea. The other nest, sadly, was found and dug up by a fox. Those poor little turtles have so many predators. Those who are not eaten by foxes still must escape raccoons, crabs, birds, fish, and eels. Only one out of a thousand hatchlings survives. What a life!
I once visited a turtle museum where you can “become” a hatchling and imitate the harrowing life and travels of these little guys. They travel thousands of miles across the ocean on sargassum seaweed mats, and females return to their birth place when they’re grown, two or three years later, to lay their eggs. The temperature of the underground nest may determine the sex of a sea turtle.
Twice I’ve seen turtles march to the sea. Once on Oak Island, our girls were walking their dogs and came running back up the beach to get me.
“Mom, Mom, there are sea turtles hatching!” I jumped out of my beach chair and ran down the beach after them. The three of us stood and watched, breathless with excitement. A small crowd had gathered, lining the stretch of sand the hatchlings would traverse on their way to the water. Turtle rescue volunteers sat by the nest. The tiny turtles, no bigger than a silver dollar, struggled mightily to make it across those few yards of sand, their little flippers churning. Some wandered slightly off course, and the volunteers gently redirected them. Then they finally reached the foamy edge of the water and submerged themselves, sometimes tumbling end to end as the water bore them up. All the people cheered for them.
The second time I saw turtles was on a girls’ trip to Costa Rica with my daughters, my sister-in-law, and her daughters. An announcement at our resort said that turtles would be released at four o’clock. All six of us made sure we joined the small gathering of people who had come to see this amazing event. The volunteers had actually dug the turtles out of the nest earlier in the day and had helped them crack out of their eggshells, and now the baby turtles clambered around the bottom of a plastic bucket, trying to climb the sides. The volunteers gently coaxed them onto the damp, hard sand near the water and, once again, the little guys struggled across the beach and tumbled into the surf as we all cheered them on, yelling, “C’mon, lil guys, you can make it!”
It’s an event worth cheering. One out of one thousand. A celebration of stunningly improbable odds. It brings tears to my eyes, to see these little living things begin their lives in such treacherous circumstances. Imagine, a few minutes after birth, undertaking a voyage thousands of miles across the ocean! Watching them reminds me that nature is amazing and harsh, and each moment of life is precious.
Later this summer, I dearly hope to see the baby turtles from the new nest make their way into the world, and, with churning tiny flippers, launch into the surf. Stay tuned!