Copyright © 1986, 1996-2010, Randy R. Johnson, all rights reserved
Ridley's Pacific Turtle is a lightweight. They call them "giant turtles" here -- whose thought of turtles is smaller-than-a-breadbox, sitting-on-a-branch river-turtle thingies. They are lightweights -- three or four feet, maybe 100 pounds, max. You could pick one up if you had to. (I did and I did.)
Big? Sure. But up against the behemoth (eight-foot, half-ton) Leatherback Turtles, let's face it, they're lightweights. Not even so big as the Green Sea Turtles who beach themselves regularly on the opposite -- the Caribbean shore of Costa Rica, only 120 miles from here as the crows fly.
Lightweights? Ridley's Pacific? I bite my pencil! Do not dare to call them lightweights when you stand on their beach at Nancite, little one-mile isolated Pacific Costa Rican beach, at the third phase of the moon. They will knock you down and trample you into their sandy omelette of Nancite Beach. This they will do no matter what you call them. For they heed not your words; but a higher calling draws them -- 'to lay, to nest, perchance to survive' -- draws them here not in ones and threes, but by the hundreds, yea the thousands, they will trample anything on their beach.
It is a good hike to Nancite Beach. A good six hours from Santa Rosa National Park Headquarters, which is itself a good five miles from the main highway that runs between Liberia, Costa Rica and the Nicaraguan frontier to the north.
Yes, it's a good six hours of miserable trails in the rainy season, when the turtles are in their peak form. The first hour and a half is an easy stroll through sloppy, shadeless savannah land, where deer, peckaries, red ants, and sunstroke prevail. There follows a brief interlude of rocky forest, correographed to the prancing of dozens and dozens of blue morpho butterflies.
Then come three more hours of swampy ankle-deep muck and black-fly jungle heat, side-stepping snakes and collecting ticks in the head-high marsh grass, arrousing the clatter of hundreds of fiery orange-and-black land crabs and dodging the fruit flung by indignant chattering white-faced capuchin monkeys; sloshing through streams and lagoons where the wood stork, snowy egret, crested heron, and the pompous scarlet spoonbill wade. Perhaps they even fling some of the small nancite fruit (english: nance), from which the beach gets its name.
At five hours a break comes with the opportunity -- at dead low tide only -- to traverse the final jutting point, clutching the sharp volcanic rocks and scuttling, under full pack, across a hundred yards of rock face, between the big breakers to reach the rope climb and hoist yourself sixty feet up over that craggy cliff to top the point.
Then it is less than an hour of stagnant mud and fresh sweat to emerge at the sun-fried serenity of little Nancite Cove -- one mile of smooth white sand, backed by a lush mangrove and crocodile swamp, and framed by two fortress points.
The beach was barren and still, dark green on sparkling white. Nothing happening here. At the far end I found Steve Cornelius in his little encampment: big tent, lean-to kitchen, jerry-made shower. A sturdy fence of unhewn limbs surrounds the camp; it stands one foot high. At night this is the only safe place on the beach. Be warned.
For the last three years, Steve had spent four months in the rainy
season at Nancite, mostly alone, to study Ridley's Pacific Turtles
under a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He loves
company, especially when the turtles come in. There is so much to
be done and so many of turtles to do it to. This year Steve has
learned to predict, for the first time, the exact date of the
arribadas, the awesome mass nestings of Ridley's turtles
at Nancite.
Awe. Yes, this feeling predominated that first night as I stood in the pouring rain -- no, tried to stand, but stumbled and fell on this beach which cannot be seen beneath the swarming mass of thousands of Ridley's little Pacific turtles.
There before me, on the wide screen of Nancite Beach, unfolded a cosmic event, truly. Thirty thousand -- count 'em (go ahead), thirty thousand -- female Ridley's come in each night for four nights at the third quarter of the moon, and then are seen no more; vanish again into the blue Pacific void.
And it is not the same jolly crowd each night. No, no; a fresh clatch invades each night -- no familiar turtle faces here. One hundred and twenty thousand turtles parked on one mile of beach in four nights. Awesome. Cosmic. (I know you don't believe me, and I'm secretly glad.)
Can I describe to you what it is like to roam that turtley beach at night, searching for foot room to tag turtles? Let's see if I can... Four hundred and fifty of the little she-buggers I wrestled for a feel of the soft flesh (in the pit of a front flipper) between my vice-grips, planting little metal number clips for science.
Step lively there! Keep your feet moving or you're knocked to your knees into the turtle-egg goo; rich orange yolks everywhere on the beach. (Yum! One or two is about all you can stand to eat.) After the first several hours, after all, they are all digging into someone else's eggs.
The Ridley's turtle spends two or three hours struggling up the beach, searching for "her spot", and then digging up a pile of eggs, mashing them under foot and carapace so the yolks pop up in all directions. She then replaces them with her own special eggs -- which some other young Ridley's mama will soon dig into and smash all to hell.
Everywhere up and down the beach (and even up into the mangroves), turtles gasp and sigh, crash against and over one another; sand and eggs fly, flippers thrash and turtle shells thump heavily, patting down the sand, as hungry raccoon and coati eyes flash double-golden fire from the bushes. (Not to mention old Red-Eye, the croc, back in the lagoon.)
And what do you think that pretty little beach at Nancite Cove looks
like at dawn, when the turtles finally retreat to the sea, when you can
turn off your head lamp and head back to camp for a wash and a
collapse; when the buzzards flock in by the hundreds -- like, well,
like vultures -- gorging on fresh warm eggs, and the saraguates
(black howler monkeys) start screaming up a storm out behind the lagoon, as
rosy-fingered dawn slowly fingerpaints over the great gray sky and the
thumping on the sand finally stops?
It looks like Normandy Beach the morning after D-Day, if everyone had been firing ping-pong balls instead of hot lead. Thirty thousand landing craft left their tracks, and most deposited their living cargo on the beach, at one hundred eggs a shot. Only a tiny fraction lie safe and warm beneath the sand. (Wait until tonight!)
It was a bloody massacre. The remains of the other eggs lie strewn all over the beach for the scavengers -- the vultures, coons, and the coatis. Not one square inch of sand is left untrampled.
And what do you think that star-crossed little beach smells like, say about noon, when the sun has been too hot for sleeping since eight am? Like two egg trains in a head-on collision outside of Bakersfield? Last week, perhaps?
And what if you do survive, you crinkly little Ridley's egg? Seven and a half weeks later, fighting up through the sand and hoping, (if there are baby turtle hopes), that you didn't muff your one chance at being born by coming up in the daytime, prey to the sun and to the thousand hungry scavengers that baby turtle flesh is heir to.
Even daytime, however, is preferable to the late ones. Put yourself in baby turtle shoes, (wee tiny shoes for a two-inch little sandy black Ridley), coming up five days late -- at night, yes, but right smack-dab in the middle of yet another insane arribada, the full-on "arrival" of the mama turtles. I have seen their pathetic little corpses, having struggled into a world of thousands of their own kind, and trampled unnoticed into the egg-sand, with no place to hide.
For this I muddied six hours of trail with my own sweat? For this breakfast cook's nightmare?
Oh, yes, for this and much more. For I have seen the few little wee ones who made it through an arribada, who emerged in the early morning and struggled down the beach, scaling my footprints like great gorges and leaving little fairy tracks like hermit crabs into the sea.
Ah! That first deep gasp of wet blue Home; those first little liquid strokes!
Yes, I have rescued turtles from the trees and rocks where they have pinned themselves helplessly. And I have gone abroad into that sea in the afternoons of turtle high tide, with mask and snorkle to cavort beyond the waves with hundreds of egg-laden she-turtles; to hitch slow turtle rides, to turtle-surf in the big curls at Nancite, Costa Rica.
Until the day we spotted a great fifteen-foot shark out beyond the
breakers. That was the final day of the arribada. Oh, pathetic it is
as well, the sad last day; the grotesque parade of the Stragglers, the
cripples who come in late, struggling up the beach like a forced march
of disabled Vets, flippers maimed and gone, shells with shark bites
taken out; the old, the infirm, and the bloody-stumpers.
Some have no rear flippers left to dig with, so they go through the
motions with phantom limbs and lay their eggs on top of the sand.
Yet these (these?) hapless survivors have the final glory. For it is they who make the last deposits in the fertile sand, digging up the nests of the eager young spunklets who arrived early, leaving their eggs to spoil and be spoils on top of the final morning omelette.
Some of these crippled old girls haven't the strength left to make it back down the beach again in the early morning. But their eggs will survive, perhaps. At least until the next great arribada, next month.