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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Open Thread: Turtle Rescue People

Open Thread: Turtle Rescue People

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Thanks to commentor Siubhanduinne for the link to the NYTimes‘ upcoming article on “The BP-Spill Baby-Turtle Brigade“:

Loggerhead nesting season started this year, as usual, in May. Across the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, female sea turtles began plodding out of the water and up the beach, each burying a clutch of a hundred or more leathery eggs beneath the sand. The eggs incubate for about 60 days. Then a throng of tiny black loggerhead hatchlings, each only about two inches long, frantically boils out of the ground, all paddling clumsily with their outsize, winglike flippers. They scuttle down the beach en masse, capitalizing on a one-time frenzy of energy to rush into the water and push past the breakers into offshore currents. Once they make it there — if they make it there — they typically find their way onto mats of seaweed called sargassum. The hatchlings will drift passively around the ocean on this sargassum for the first several years of their lives, like children inner-tubing in a swimming pool. It’s a life raft from which, conveniently, they can also pluck snacks…
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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.
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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.
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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…

Always nice to start the weekend with a happy ending. Great anecdotes and “squee-worthy” pictures at the link.

Reader Interactions

34Comments

  4. 4.

    WereBear

    Bless them, because it’s not so easy to love turtles.

    They do, however, have a great name and a very appealing persona. I’m just a mammal person, I suppose.

  5. 5.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Thanks for posting this link and excerpts from the article, Anne Laurie. When I saw it, it seemed that it would go well with your wonderful ongoing series of pet rescue stories.

    And I have to agree with

  6. 6.

    hilzoy

    We are such a peculiar species. Some of us videotape people having sex and broadcast it live on the internet, or live to insult other people on blogs, or are hateful in other ways, for no apparent reason. And some of us spend our time helping tiny turtles to survive:

    “In a normal year, 55 days after each nest is laid, volunteers would stay up beside the nest all night, for several nights, listening with a stethoscope for the first rustling of hatchlings underground. Then they’d string up a tarp, shielding the nest on three sides from the artificial light of beachfront development and roads. (Bright lights disorient hatchlings, luring them in the exact opposite direction — away from the water — from the one they need to be going in.) Volunteers would then dig a flat-bottomed trench in the sand, from the nest all the way to the water, to keep the hatchlings on course. Then they’d take shifts waiting. “It’s just us, kind of like a family group waiting for someone to have a baby,” one of the Debbies told me. They call it “nest-sitting.”

    Watch a nest erupt and the hatchlings sprint for the water just once and you’re hooked, the turtle people all told me. “You’re just wondering how God put all this together,” one man said. And since 2001, Alabama’s turtle people have helped about 80,000 loggerhead babies make it into the Gulf; before Share the Beach started, Fish and Wildlife estimates, very few hatchlings were surviving. (The organization formed when neighbors found an entire nest’s worth of hatchlings squashed or flailing in an illuminated parking lot one morning and decided they had seen enough.)”

    I always wonder: what makes the difference? Why do some people look at a bunch of squashed turtle hatchlings and feel moved to stay up all night, year after year, protecting other tiny baby turtles, while others go in the other direction entirely?

  7. 7.

    Martin

    Good god:

    After Witchcraft I Tried to Be A Hare Krishna — But I Liked Meatballs Too Much

    Conservatives and tea partiers quite simply want to destroy this country through incompetence in governance. For all their bullshit about deficits and entitlement programs and whatnot, by insisting on electing people that are manifestly unqualified to even understand these issues, it only proves that they’re absolutely willing to melt the place down rather than let anyone try to actually fix things. They’re not the Confederate party, they’re the Nihilism party.

  8. 8.

    SiubhanDuinne

    FYWP.

    (Ahem. As I was saying. . . .)

    I have to agree with WereBear that mammals are easier to love than turtles. But damn, there’s something so adorable about dozens of tiny turtlings making a mad, determined, single-minded dash to the sea that both cracks me up and brings me to the brink of tears. And the gentleness of these volunteers, and their innovation in making sure these babies had a fighting chance against BP, is one of the loveliest things to come out of that whole unspeakable disaster.

  9. 9.

    Nicole

    RIP Stephen J Cannell. Through watching your shows, I became the liberal I am today. Thanks to your work, I learned that ex-cons can become productive members of society, the military wastes enormous resources on erroneous vendettas and that the FBI is concealing the existence of aliens who possess supersuit technology.

  10. 10.

    General Stuck

    @hilzoy:

    Eternal questions with difficult answers. I tend to think of it as some people are just pissed off for having been born, and even more pissed at being mortal. And they take out there anger on about anything that crosses their path. And others just don’t care ot inflict pain on other living things as a sad and desperate attempt to fill that existential void.

  12. 12.

    Chris

    @Nicole:
    RIP Steven Cannell who’s fertile imagination in the Rockford Files fueled many unfortunate fashion choices for me during the 70’s. I was the 10 y.o. with the sport jacket, slacks and open collar at church on Sunday. Also Jim Rockford inspired my current business model. That is…doing lots of work and struggling to get paid.

  13. 13.

    annp23

    @ hilzoy

    I’m not sure that any of us live to videotape people having sex and broadcast it live on the internet or to insult other people on blogs, but far too many of us get trapped into thinking the only way we’re ever going to be somebody or accomplish anything is by tearing down those around us, so we stand that much higher in the social scale. It’s the idea of life as a zero-sum game, and the results are clearly devastating.

    And I think part of reason people get stuck in that zero-sum spiral is because they simply don’t feel that they have any real ability to act on a grander scale. They need a jolt — in this case a turtle-lover’s emergency — where they can act big.

    I just bought this book — and haven’t had a chance to read it yet — “A Paradise Built in Hell: Communities That Rise to the Challenge of Disaster”: http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/activism/2112-a-paradise-built-in-hell-communities-rise-to-the-challenge-of-disaster

    And after all these years, I still firmly believe that most of us want to do the right thing, and when really pushed, when we’re really awake and aware, we usually do.

  14. 14.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Martin #7: She *is* meatballs!

    Um, seriously, there’s no chance she’s actually going to win in November, is there? Because while CO’D is amusing as all getout as a candidate, I would weep for the Nation if she got anywhere close to Capitol Hill.

  15. 15.

    Martin

    Sounds like California might finally have a budget. Only 3 months late. No details. My guess is the state employees are going to get moderately fucked on their pension.

  16. 16.

    Dee Loralei

    @Martin: To go along with Hilzoy’s other eternal question, in re your Christine O’Donnell thing, doesn’t anyone love or care enough about Christine to tell her she’s not truly worthy of being in the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body”? ( I put it in quotes, because whilst it may be true, it’s collectively nonsense; when it’s peopled with the likes of Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn and James Imhoff.) I know she has no spouse, but neither parent, no sibling, cousin nor any dear friend warned her not to run? How could you love someone and NOT tell them they were patently unqualified ? How can you NOT try to save someone you love from humiliation? Or from causing themselves pain? I just don’t get it.

    I used to wonder the same thing about Michael Jackson and all those people who swore they were his dear friends and loved him so musc. ( Not talking about fans, but actual friends.) Like Liz Taylor and several others. Say even if he hadn’t molested the first boy, why did no one sit him down and say ” Honey, you don’t invite children to have sleep overs. You don’t ever allow them into your bed and you don’t plie them with ” Jesus Juice” real adults don’t act this way. Real adults don’t need the adulation of these children and famous and rich people must worry always about the appearance of impropriety and being perceived as being perverted because there are people who will use your weakness to be kind to kids in order to make themselves rich at your humiliating expense.”

    So maybe Christine’s folks or her live in boyfriend did have this conversation with her and she decided fuck them, I want to be in the Senate. But why they are continuing to stand behind her is another eternal question……..

    And to Hilzoy, maybe you should go back to Wa-Mo and blog more on your thoughts on your eternal question. Damn, we miss you.

  18. 18.

    MikeJ

    @SiubhanDuinne: What real difference would it make if she were elected or if sane, sensible, everybody’s friend Mike Castle had been elected? Sure, she’s nuts. but her voting record would be identical to the guy that so many people think would have been good.

  19. 19.

    Yutsano

    TURTLE!! I miss my boys now!

    @Martin: Frankly, I’m not sure how much or little that fact bothers me anymore. As long as she loses I’ll take that fact and run with it. If she’s not humiliated it’s irrelevant, at least to me.

  20. 20.

    Martin

    @Dee Loralei: Yeah, I agree, though with a few hundred million people that could run for office, finding a person who has trouble self-assessing their competence and is surrounded only by people that have the same problem should yield quite a few candidates.

    However, in order to get elected, you either need to convince a large percentage of the population that you’re qualified (which is nigh-impossible in this case) or you need to rely on a large percentage of the population that doesn’t care if you’re qualified or not. That’s the astonishing part.

  21. 21.

    Martin

    @MikeJ: Well, voting isn’t all that happens there. Someone has to write the legislation, someone needs to negotiate that legislation. Does anyone really think that O’Donnell could write legislation? What about direct staff to write it? What about to negotiate a sticking point in committee? I’m almost positive should can’t even understand legislation written by others

  22. 22.

    MikeJ

    @Martin: I don’t think GOP leadership would let Castle Castle’s LD write legislation either. They might let her present whatever comes in from the Chamber of Commerce and present it as hers., but no Republican is going top present legislation in public until leadership has had a chance to rewrite it.

    That’s mostly true for Dems too, but not quite to the same extreme.

    Negotiating legislation? With who? That fact that she didn’t understand it would only be seen as a good thing.

    She would so as she was told, vote the way she was told, and be allowed to do some public bible thumping on an issue every now and then.

  23. 23.

    Martin

    @MikeJ: Well, I’m not considering her an isolated case. If they’re willing to elect one Senator like her, why not 50 of them? Then who’s going to deal with this stuff?

  24. 24.

    CaseyL

    That story made my night; possibly my week.

    I lived in Miami in the 1980s. They have a terrific zoo, Miami MetroZoo. I was a docent there for a few years; among the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.

    But before I was a volunteer, and had to behave myself, I used to do things like pet any animal that came close enough to be petted. The zoo residents included a few Galapagos tortoises, who passed the days in a large paddock filled with rocks and bushes and snacks. One day I couldn’t withstand the temptation anymore, leaned over, and stroked one of the tortoises along the throat. Rough skin, surprisingly thin, wrinkly and sand-dabbled and damp. The tortoise seemed to like it: didn’t withdraw into his (her?) shell, but kept his head craned high so I could keep stroking. The next time I went to the zoo (not too long thereafter; I was a regular even before I was a docent), and visited “my” tortoises, one of them saw me, came hurrying over (“hurrying” for a Galapagos tortoise, that is) and craned his head up to stick his neck out and get some pets. I swear it was the same one, how not?

    I’ve since learned that those tortoises can’t see very well, and are – how to put this? – a bit indiscriminate about where they bestow their affections. (The males have been known to try mating with tortoise-shaped rocks.) So I don’t know what that tortoise was thinking, or what he thought the two of us were up to :)

    Gods and goddesses bless the folks who help the little turtles make it to the sea; and bless the turtles, too!

  28. 28.

    Steeplejack

    @Chris:

    Also Jim Rockford inspired my current business model. That is . . . doing lots of work and struggling to get paid.

    Amen to that as well.

  32. 32.

    Dee Loralei

    I’m going to bed. But the story got me all teary-eyed when the lady in Alabama sent a camera with her turtle eggs off to the FL Atlantic Coast, because dammit she wanted pics of her babies making it toward the surf…..

    …It also touched me when the big burly men welding those syphoning machines stopped to wait for the itty bitty stragglers to break the surf. It was a lovely story, thanks Anne Laurie and SD for bringing it to our attention.

    Dee

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