Back in August, a group from the Embassy went to the northern coast of Cyprus to visit the Society for the Protection of Turtles (SPOT) project, based out of Alagadi Beach.
Scattered around the beach were 18-inch high plastic cages that look like upside down plant trellises. During the summer months, volunteers (mostly British university students) walk the length of the beach all night long. In the early summer, they watch to see where female turtles lay their eggs and then they install the plastic cages to prevent the turtles nests from being disturbed by predators or humans. Later in the summer, they watch to see which nests have hatched. Once a nest hatches, within the next 1-2 days the volunteers will dig the nest up to see if there are any surviving hatchlings who didn’t make it all the way out. If there were, we’d release them into the ocean later that night (apparently turtles have trouble navigating in the daylight, so when it’s time to release them it’s best done in the dark).
There are two types of turtles that nest at Alagadi, leatherback and green. We were warned sometimes there would be very few little guys to dig up, but once the volunteers excavated the nest to about two feet deep, the first buggers started to wiggle out. There were 43 in all! Curious onlookers began to arrive who were very anxious to take a peek. At this point, only the volunteers got to hold the turtles because turtles carry salmonella and SPOT rightfully does not trust a bunch of random people at a beach to go wash their hands immediately after handling. (Indeed, in spite of the warning and washing our hands immediately after releasing them, one of the Embassy kids ended up getting salmonella and spent five days in the hospital!)
The turtles were pretty active at this point– it did make me wonder why they failed to get out of the nest when the rest of their comrades had. I also wondered if we weren’t messing with the natural order of things. After all, if these turtles couldn’t even be bothered to leave their nest, how were they going to survive out in the REAL WORLD? That said, if digging these losers out of their hole meant we were going to get to HOLD BABY TURTLES, Sev and I were totally game.
After the volunteers got sandy and sweaty digging turtles, we took a break to have dinner at a beachside cafe. Dinner was small mere plates and tuvuk shish (that’s chicken shish kebab). Sev enjoyed an Efes beer, we watched the sunset and chatted with our new colleagues.
Once it was good and dark, we went back to the turtle shack to watch a brief video about turtles (your plastic grocery bags are killing them, by the way). Interestingly, the female turtles born on this beach will keep coming back here to lay their eggs for the rest of their lives. Even turtles are sentimental, apparently.
We stumbled to the beach in the moonlight/starlight and lined up just short of where the waves hit the shore. Sev and I were the first to get our turtles– he named his Theodore and I named mine Beatrix with an “X”. The turtles were the size of our palms but we had to hold them between our thumb and forefinger only. I was anxious for the Embassy kids to get their game together and focus because the little buggers were squirming (the turtles, I mean) and I was afraid of maiming Beatrix before she even had a shot at life. Those little flippers are surprisingly strong and I think she sensed her freedom and was eager to get paddling!
With red headlamps trained on the sand, we counted to three and released 30 turtles at once. They flitted toward the water and most were washed away with in seconds. I turned to Sev and commented on how surreal it was to release a bunch of baby turtles into the eastern Med, when just a few weeks before we had been in a Residence Inn in Washington tying up loose ends and anxiously pondering our future life.