Week 1 of Turtle Rescue 2021
[Our internet access has been limited since we've minimized expenses, so our updates may post asynchronously.]
Update: July 11, 2021
An exciting and busy first week of the Turtle Rescue Season 2021 has come to an end at the Tapiche Jungle Reserve in the northern Amazon of Peru. In only the first week of this year's rescue season we have collected 45 nests with over 1500 turtle eggs, all from the Yellow-spotted River Turtle (Podocnemis unifilis).
We went out to monitor the beaches at least three times per day - in the early morning, shortly after midday, and in the night - and we came back to the lodge with buckets full of turtle eggs every single day. It seems that even though the turtle rescue season was delayed in starting, the turtles have just been waiting to make their nests and somehow made up for lost time. This year's season started about two weeks later than in 2020, but we still collected more eggs than last year at the same time (1414 turtle eggs by July 11, 2020).
The rescue season is an especially challenging time for the staff of the Tapiche Jungle Reserve, as monitoring the beaches and collecting the eggs sometimes means going out before sunset and not coming back to the lodge until after midnight. And the work isn't finished when we come back to the lodge - the collected turtle eggs still have to be carefully re-buried in our incubation boxes. This means we have to manually dig artificial nests, carefully transfer each and every delicate little turtle egg into the new nests, and then close everything up carefully using techniques we've observed from mother turtles in the wild.
The hard work is very rewarding and this week we were honoured to witness a Yellow-spotted River Turtle making her nest. When we arrived at the beach to look for turtle tracks and other surface signs of nests, we realized that one turtle was still in the process of making her nest. She was laying the eggs in the nest, and though we remained on the boat in total silence at a safe distance so she wouldn't feel disturbed, we could still hear the eggs being deposited into the nest. Around 20 minutes after we arrived to the beach, she finished laying the eggs and proceeded to close the nest. She pushed sand on the hole with her strong, paddle-like feet and alternated between tamping down the sand with her legs and flattening it with her belly. At the very end, she threw loose sand over the closed nest to camouflage it and then moved 1.5m to the side, where she repeated the actions of 'closing the nest' and camouflaging it. We've observed that the turtles often manipulate the sand around where the actual nest is, which we think may be a tactic to better hide their nests from predators.
We are humbled by the presence of these amazing creatures and are once again left speechless by the wonders of mother nature. Seeing this vulnerable species at the Tapiche Jungle Reserve thriving in their natural habitat and creating a new generation of baby turtles is a wonderful reward for all of our conservation work, which has only been possible because of all the support we have gotten in the past and which we gratefully continue to receive today. Thank you so much to everyone who has visited in the past and to those who are supporting us from everywhere in the world.
If you feel inspired to support the Turtle Rescue Project, our GoFundMe https://gofund.me/472e0a00 will remain open, and funds will be used to sustain operations and pay local staff since we still don't have a stable tourism income. Thank you so much!
