She was merely fifteen when she patiently lay offshore in the tropical warm eastern Pacific off the modest beach which is called Ostional in a land which, five centuries before, Captain Christopher Columbus had named “Costa Rica”, the “rich coast.”
She was an olive ridley sea turtle.
And soon, our lives would come together for a few short hours and I’d have a Costa Rica ecotourism experience of a lifetime.
The almost daily afternoon tropical rains had ended as the marine turtle continued to wait expectantly. The moon was in its last quarter and, despite the fact that the young reptile did not know why, it was having an effect on her, just as earth’s silent partner had for many generations before her.
As it has done for uncountable years, the moon was passing through its apparently eternal phases. Though she couldn’t comprehend it, powerful but unseen was drawing this olive ridley turtle to a beach where she had hatched. She was not the only turtle silently waiting to go ashore. Shortly as she began her vigil, just a few meters from her, another Pacific sea turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a few more, then hundreds, thousands, now many thousands of equally silent but pregnant female marine sea turtles. For more than one hundred million years it was the same spectacle: enormous migrations of one of the world’s oldest animals, culminating when the moon was in this stage.
Nature is always mysterious. Just two or three months ago, this turtle was floating around in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean more than 2,500 miles from the beach to which she was returning. And the tens of thousands now together with her were spread throughout more than a million square miles of ocean.
Although there was plenty of food far out in the Pacific, something had started to wake inside her. Thousands just like her felt the same eternal need to come back to Costa Rica. They, and she, were all heading back again to exactly where they had hatched.
Now, many months after something inside had first spoken to her to her, she patiently lay in the gentle light just a couple of hundred meters from her destination. She had swum so terribly far and yet now the silent voice that previously had led her to this moonlit beach commanded her to wait. She was anxious. Over the many weeks and thousands of miles she had swum she had come across many different male olive ridley marine turtles in the huge blue tropical sea waters and several had mated with her for the reason that, like her, they also were being affected by something unseen, a primeval impulse. No matter what it was, it was so powerful that her kind had been going back to Ostional Beach since before the earliest dinosaur.
Throughout the tropical night this small marine turtle had been waiting. She had mysteriously found the same beach where she had first crawled to the sea. We don’t know how an olive ridley sea turtle finds the exact beach where she started off life. There are only a few nesting beaches on earth and they are not very large. In reality Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters in length. Now part of Costa Rica’s Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is possibly the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on the globe.
Incredibly, in 1995, the year this turtle hatched, probably up to 500,000 female olive pacific sea turtles had found their way ashore to nest here in huge numbers. These immense invasions are called “arribadas” —which loosely means “they are arriving”— and more and more tourists are witnessing them during their Costa Rica vacations.
Unfortunately, our sea turtle’s mother will not nest at Ostional this year. For the last two decades, her mother had joined gigantic Ostional arribadas each year and she would probably have done so once again except that she perished in a shrimping net not fitted with an internationally required turtle release device. Long-line fishermen killed thousands more in what is euphemistically called “incidental catch” virtually completely avoidable simply by using larger hooks. Uncounted thousands died unnecessarily from consuming plastic bags.
Naturally, the hundreds of thousands of olive ridleys just offshore know none of this. As we look over the bay in the soft moonlight, there are now so many that it just about appears a person could walk on their backs for a mile or more. All of us stare in amazment at the pure magnitude of God’s creation.
They have no idea or comprehend that they had been on earth millions of years before the first Tyrannosaurus Rex. They also don’t know that we are waiting for them to come ashore so that when they lay their eggs on this tiny wildlife refuge, men, women, and children will legally raid their nests and collect many eggs from the first nesting turtles in return for protecting the rest of the clutches and preserving their kind.
They also don’t know that they are endangered and that their future potentially rests on people like you and me. Or that, like their endangered cousin, the Atlantic green sea turtle, Costa Rica ecotourism at Tortuguero Park and other Costa Rica marine turtle preserves, may be saving their ancient races from extinction.
They only know that this is where they are meant to be.
Suddenly, as silently as they first appeared beyond the surf, as soundlessly as they had gathered, as patiently as they had waited, they begin to arrive ashore. One turtle, a second, dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—even more than that–lumber onto the sand and nest.
All night, all day, day after day in an amazing display of life. As eternal as the moon itself.
Arribadas! They’re arriving!
