The long walk.

Last year I read Slawomir Rawicz’s book, The Long Walk, detailing his personal journey from Siberia to India after escaping Russian capture pre-WWII – great book, some controversy around whether or not the details in it are true, but you can make that judgment if you decide to read it yourself. BUT regardless, I seem to keep coming back to that book every night when I feel tired.

Basically, a large portion of my position as a “patrol leader” here in Tortuguero consists of patrolling the beach at night for nesting turtles. With this, COTERC (Canadian Organization for Tropical Education and Rainforest Conservation) can basically take data on the nesting turtles, nests and nest success, to keep a long term record of nesting turtles on Playa Norte.

The transect that we cover is 3 and 1/8 miles however on night patrols we are required to double back on the beach instead of taking a path home. During the morning patrols we can just do 3 and 1/8 miles and take a path back home. So depending on if we see a turtle or not sometimes you can walk anywhere from 6.5 miles to 10 miles on the wet sand, on the beach, without any light at all, until about 2 or 3am – its around 1am that I usually start to think of The Long Walk and it usually helps me put my (not so) long walk into perspective.

Last night Sarah and I were extremely lucky though, and had our first turtle encounter. She was a hawksbill. At night unfortunately we can’t take pictures…for a few reasons – 1. turtles are sensitive to white light, 2. anything with light can give away our location to poachers. So I have stolen this picture instead.

Hawksbill turtle
(Taken from: http://www.seaturtle.org/imagelib/?photo=4669)

It was pretty exciting…especially since we found her as we were nearing the end of the transect.  If we hadn’t found her, we would have had to turn around and continue walking for another hour, so she saved us. When we found her she didn’t nest, and ended up going back into the water shortly after. But because poaching is so high here we were happy that we found her and saw her back into the water, since hawksbill shells are highly prized.

My next night walk is tomorrow…so hopefully we will get lucky again.

For more info on COTERC's turtle projects click here!