I stood there contemplating whether
the heavy tracks leading up the steeply sloping sand berm were of human or
turtle origin in the inky darkness. When
I had sufficiently convinced myself that they were human I turned and took one
more step towards finishing my patrol, when I looked up from my path to see a
voluminous blackness slowly creeping, lunging, breathing, resting, breathing,
and lunging her heavy body awkwardly out of the sea. This female’s body was created by design for
the water and not very practical on the land.
However, her instincts, passed on from her dinosaur ancestors for a
million years, were to seek out a beach from whence she had hatched in which to
lay her offspring, and successfully complete her circle of life. She struggled with her weight issues up the
berm, slowly, ever slowly. I crouched a
fair distance from her, waiting to pounce once she began digging so that I could
look at her flippers for tags. She was
approximately 6 feet long and 5 feet wide, probably weighed in at 700 lbs, and
had a shell that looked different from all other turtle species, with ridged
lines running lengthwise down her back instead of checkerboard patterns of
plates. She was a Leatherback, the
deepest diving, the biggest nesting, the largest egging, the greatest at
everything, sea turtle. What a tremendous
honor indeed, to be in the presence of such a magnificent fish.
She would grunt and groan while she
meticulously dug her nest as if she was a pregnant woman in labor with child. The undertones in her grumbling voice spoke
to the trials of motherhood with every shovel-full of sand she removed from the
deepening pit below her. Her first nest
chamber kept caving in between her sheer weight and the dry sand area she had
chosen just above the berm. She
abandoned it and moved to a spot just a few feet away, this pit also
caved. She crawled down the large sand
cliff again and I thought she would leave us, then she got her bearings and
started up the hill for a second attempt.
What an overwhelming effort to pull her weight up and over and begin to
dig again. Her third site was still too
close to the water but it was located within some vegetation so it did not
collapse this time. We would have to
relocate the nest to higher ground. Like
a catcher sprawled over home base I stuck the entire length of my arm down into
the black hole of her nest, face in the sand reaching for a greater extension,
and began to gather cue-ball sized eggs with my gloved hand and place them
aside for later. She naturally held her
canoe paddle-sized hind flipper between her eggs dropping and the outside world
to protect them from predators. I was
hoping she knew I was trying to help her and not stealing her precious cargo as
my skinny arm slipped into the narrow crack between her flipper and the side of
the nest. One hundred and twenty eight
eggs later, she finished laying and began to cover her nest. I scrambled to gather the remaining smaller
yolkless eggs as she pinned my arm in the process. She had more strength packed in her toenail
than I had in my whole arm.
Like a wind-up toy she mechanically
threw sand back with her front flippers and packed it down with her hind
flippers, not realizing that she was covering eggs that weren’t there any
longer. With such force that the sand
flew up and back about 8 feet, spraying us if we weren’t careful to stay out of
the way. After much throwing and patting
to camouflage her nest sufficiently, she began to lumber toward the sea. With what appeared to be a sigh of relief,
but was probably just her taking a breath, she headed down the berm. Halfway down she slid like a child on a snowy
hill and practically fell into the lapping tide. I thought I saw her smile. Her back shiny now from the water, glistened
in the full-moonlight and the twinkling lights of Christensted. She slipped beneath the surface sleek, black,
and beautiful and flew through the sea effortlessly, leaving her laborious task
behind and returning back to her true element.
We relocated her nest to an area where her babies would be safe from
storms. It was the least I could do to
get them off to a good start, after all, she blessed me with a memory that will
last a lifetime.
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