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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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The
turtle project by Mirja Ahti On the train, I made observations how people interacted while travelling. There was an old man wearing exceptionally thick-lensed spectacles in heavy black frames trying to untangle the chain of his Christian cross. He was keeping himself to himself and did not talk to or look at anyone. Diagonally opposite me were two middle class Hindu couples, each with a young child. The mothers were sisters, as I discovered when they offered to share some of their fruit with us. The two ladies wore wilting jasmine in their hair and lots of expensive-looking jewellery. They looked well-fed. One of them bought something from every casual vendor walking through the carriage: nuts, snacks, chai and noisy plastic toys for the children. They looked very contented, and seemed to be at ease. A young Muslim couple next to them had a lively 4-5 year old girl, who got smacked every time she tried to get up or change her position. She was dressed in a lace trimmed dress and shiny shoes, which made her look like a doll. The wife offered us and the Hindu families some crisps, and helped themselves to other people’s magazines without asking. Then the three of them spread out to occupy parts of other people’s seats. On the other side of the carriage was a Hindu man travelling with his elderly mother. They didn’t talk but the old lady was sitting cross-legged smiling. Directly opposite me was a fat Muslim man with white beard neatly trimmed to frame his chin. His thin, white embroidered tunic accentuated the size of his belly, and his teeth and corners of his mouth were stained with areca nut paan. He too took magazines belonging to the Hindu families without asking. I didn’t like the way he was eyeing all the female children, touching and stroking whenever possible. He got up to stand up on the aisle, and wouldn’t move when the traders tried to get through. My dislike of him grew when he sat down, scratched his crotch and picked his nose openly. Yet nobody else seemed to be bothered. I could not detect any tension whatsoever, apart from my own unease. On my previous rail journeys I hadn’t seen beggars on the train. An old man with legs disfigured by polio was crawling just using his hands and belly. There was another severely disabled beggar playing his accordion, a tiny girl collecting for him. At the station we met Sanju’s driver who took me and my fellow volunteer to the office. Sanju was a Chennai University student who organised the turtle project. He was well dressed in western style, wearing an expensive looking pair of spectacles and a watch. He had found us a hotel, but the room rates were seriously over budget. Finally we settled for a tourist hostel where we could have two single rooms for a third of the cost of a twin in the hotel, still over our budget, but the choices were limited. Later, as we walked to the beach, Arun told us about the project. The turtles are olive ridley turtles, an endangered species. Their future is in even greater jeopardy on this beach, after the Tamil Nadu state government approved the building of luxury dwellings along the shore. The female comes ashore at night during January to March, makes a body hole in the sand for herself and then digs another about 40 cm deep inside the body hole for the eggs. The body hole conceals the female during laying. Each turtle lays between 30 and 160 eggs, depending on the season. Hatching of wild nests is usually 90% successful. On Chennai beach, some poaching goes on, but it’s not on an organised scale. The main cause of hatchlings’ deaths is human habitation. As the eggs hatch, the babies instinctively follow the reflection of moonlight on the surface, and find their way to the sea. Lights from human habitation confuse a large number of baby turtles and make them turn in the wrong direction, away from the sea. They get lost in the vegetation and rubbish where they become food for birds, rats and dogs. This project is trying to prevent this from happening. The group walks along the beach at night during the laying season. Arun showed us how to spot the turtle trails. They look just like narrow tractor marks in the sand. The nest can be identified relatively easily. We looked for circular, compacted areas of sand. The eggs are somewhere near the circumference. The boys felt the sand with sticks for the least compacted area, which is where the eggs are (the mother turtle covers the hole by flicking sand over the eggs). The eggs are then gently removed, the dimensions of the nest hole measured carefully and a hole of identical proportions dug in a protected hatchery to house the eggs. The beach looked mysterious at night. An occasional dog appearing from the dark took us by surprise. Our eyes got used to avoiding rubbish and going around sleeping bodies that at first looked like piles of clothes wrapped up. The ocean surf reflected the moonlight, and phosphorous plankton added a magical luminescence to the waves. After a mile or so, we met people who had found five newly hatched turtles in the weeds. Arun and the students took the babies and we went to the water to release them. We watched them washed away by the waves, their natural habitat. After another short walk, we found a nest. The students were convinced that it was fresh, but we didn’t find any eggs in it. They carried on poking for a little while in disbelief, but the site was definitely empty. Further along the beach, we passed a small fishing community. There were nets piled up on the beach and primitive fishing boats, some just consisting of two logs tied together. Between the vessels fishermen and their families slept on the sand in separate groups. We carried on walking, talking softly. Vin, one of the students, told us that it is extremely rare to see a turtle laying eggs. He had witnessed this only once. Just then Arun spotted a female turtle settling in the nest. Once she has started laying, she can’t stop, he says. Oblivious to us, the turtle continued laying in the hollow as we crouched around her in silence. I felt honoured and privileged to watch this creature, whose kind first inhabited the earth over 200 million years ago. Still undisturbed by our presence, the turtle used her flippers to spray sand over the eggs. Finally she performed a strange ‘dance’ using her body to flatten the surface into her characteristic circle, left the site slowly and slid into the ocean waves. Now it was easy to find the eggs. Joseph and Vin knew how to handle the white ping pong ball sized spheres. They felt slightly leathery, but brittle. One by one, slowly and patiently, we collected 89 eggs. The hatchery was a short walk away. It is an open, fenced off area with 52 artificial nest sites, each covered by a basket to prevent hatchlings from escaping and birds attacking them. We were told that the volunteers expect five of the nests to hatch anytime. The hatching period is up to fifty days, depending on the temperature. The student volunteers mark each nest and keep records. The turtle babies have just five hours worth of energy reserve, so they have act quickly and take them to the sea. The students let us help construct the nest according to the original measurements. The eggs need to be buried at different depths, as the gender of a turtle is dependent entirely on the temperature of the sand. It was three
o’clock when we were finally given a straw mat each, and settled
to lie on the sand. It’s amazingly restful to sleep on the beach
in the fresh air listening to the waves rolling in. Yet we all got up
at dawn, six o’clock. My body fought against it, but the students
wanted to catch the first bus back, and secure the hatchery. Later, I took a rickshaw to the meeting point for the next evening’s turtle walk. As we crossed a long bridge, a repulsive smell of sewage and rotting flesh hits us from the darkness below. Fortunately, it was soon replaced by the scent of jasmine and frangipani as we turned on to the shore road. There were still quite a few young people milling around. A flying fox vanished behind a tree. It was still warm. I felt strangely at calm and at peace. Vin arrived with another turtle walker and two observers. One of these was a wealthy local boy who works in advertising and the other one had made his fortune in software design in Australia. All of them were dressed in global brands, the sort of quality casuals you see in any resort frequented by the wealthy. Vin had planned a longer walk this time. The moon was rising from the sea, the colour of mango flesh, shaped like a smile. Vin did not want to start the walk until the moon gave enough light for everyone to see where they were going. Two black dogs joined us as we started the walk. We met some boys fishing for crabs. It was still difficult to see people until they were very close. The moonlight was not strong enough for us to see people who lay sleeping, wrapped up in dark clothes or fish nets. Even close by, they looked like bundles of equipment. There was a long-dead dolphin on the beach. Despite all our efforts, the other student volunteer was the one who found a fresh turtle body hole. With just one poke of his stick he located a nest within the circle. The eggs were larger than the previous day. He let me help with removing the eggs. We collected them carefully into his canvas bags. There were 80 of them this time. On this stretch of the beach, there was only a slice of the moon and stars for illumination. Considering that we were so close to a densely populated city with its habitation spilling onto the beach, there was hardly any noise. The loudest sound was the waves hitting the sand. This coast has a very deep shelf that generates extremely strong currents. Even wading is dangerous here, I was told. When we reached the hatchery, there was a group of people sleeping next to the fence. The student, who found the eggs, dug a replica nest, while the rest of us looked for escaped hatchlings. Vin thought there were more around after he found one in the sand. It was carried ceremoniously to the sea to entertain us and the observers. In the morning, just after six, as if by agreement, all of us woke up. My body felt stiff from sleeping on a hard, uneven surface. I walked to the bus stop. Now I saw the luxurious sprawling houses along the shore. The architecture was a mixture of Georgian townhouse, Spanish villa, with mosque-like domes or towers of a Bavarian castle, with some characteristic Indian touches too. Maybe this was a part of the Kollywood dream, as the Chennai-based Tamil film industry is known. This city has some of the poorest people in the world. There have been cases of parents selling their own organs just to feed the family. The rich, living in their mansions along the beach, fit security lights to safeguard their property. I wonder if they know about the turtles. First published in VISA 87 (Oct 2009) |