| The green turtle, an
endangered species, visits this island by hundreds to leave their eggs
here. Usually they appear around midnight and dig a perfect round hole
with their back-feet in about 30-45 minutes and then lay maybe 200
eggs. After then the hole is covered again.
The turtles were not very impressed by our
presence. On one of our trips a camera-team of a local TV-station
joined us, and they filmed the animals with quite bright lights for
a documentary.
Nest-building and laying eggs seems to be VERY hard for the animals because
sometimes we observed them totally exhausted and they had problems to
get back to
the nearby water. As seen on the pictures, the island is very narrow. It was
interesting to see, that all turtles came from the same direction, but
some of them left the island from the opposite side where they came
from.
Once we (4 persons) carried a turtle to the water, because it seemed
to us she would
die. The heavy animal could not walk anymore. They are very heavy, I
think at least 100kg (200 pounds). It happened just before
sunrise and the turtles cannot resist the hot sun on the island.
On several mornings we could observe the
hatching of the turtles. Suddenly they appeared on the surface and hurried towards the water. It is an
impressive, but also a very sad scene. Many birds are waiting for this moment and
kill the small turtles by hundreds on their way to the "safe"
Caribbean. The small creatures were easy victims for gulls, cormorants
and even crabs. It is very hard to observe
this killings, but this is nature. Of course we saved as much turtles
as we could and carried them into the water. But who knows, what
kind of enemies are also still waiting in the water ... Probably
a very small percentage of them survive to grow up.
I think, only few people had the possibility to
observe turtles like I could. I am very grateful about it. |
