Turtle Nesting Season 2020 is (almost) here!

We’re half through June and the water level of the river has been dropping during the past few weeks here at the Tapiche Jungle Reserve in the northern Amazon of Peru. The water is almost at its lowest level, which means that the sandy beaches along the river are coming out of the water again. The beaches provide important nesting habitat for the 3 different kinds of river turtles at Tapiche – the Arrau turtle (Podocnemis expansa) locally known as "charapa," the Six-tubercled Amazon River turtle (Podocnemis sextuberculata) locally known as "cupiso," and the Yellow-spotted Amazon river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis) locally known as "taricaya."

Due to the pandemic situation, our tourism operations and therefore all of our income has been suspended for the past few months, and we are doing the best we can with minimal staff and resources to continue preserving the forest and its inhabitants. We would not be able to do this without our friends and supporters from all over the world and want to say a special thank you to Louisa Wang, Vince & Kaiti Fasburg and Jenny Rosenberger & Jesse Kelly. We feel extremely humbled and grateful for your support and can not put into words how much this means to us and to the jungle. Thank you!

Today we began preparing our turtle hatchery for this year’s nesting season. We renewed the structure of last year’s turtle hatchery (it was completely under water during the past months because of the flood), softened up and evened out the ground, brought about one ton of the fine sand from the beaches and put it in the incubation boxes. Doing so, we try to recreate the natural conditions of the beaches where the turtles lay their eggs.

Now that the first incubation box is completely ready, we are prepared for the turtles to start laying their eggs. We will collect the eggs from the beaches and re-bury them in our the newly renovated incubation boxes in front of the lodge to protect them from being collected by poachers who would sell those eggs on the black market. We will keep you updated with all the turtle news on our Facebook (Tapiche Jungle Reserve) and Instagram (@tapichejungle) accounts, so make sure you follow us to virtually be part of this nesting season.