What exactly am I doing on a gorgeous island in the Caribbean Sea, working through the night for two weeks? I am here as part of Earthwatch Institute, an international non-profit organization near Boston which brings volunteers -- willing to travel at their own expense and eager to make a difference – together in the field with research scientists from universities, laboratories, and museums.

Though Earthwatch began in 1974 with a mere 39 people on four teams, today adventurers from 16 to over 80, and from the United States and abroad, clamor to volunteer for the field research. Says founding member and former president Brian Rosborough, “Earthwatch is a little bit like Tom Sawyer; we’re getting a thousand people a year to whitewash the fence!”

My fellow “whitewashers” on the leatherback turtle project include a naturalist; a pharmacist and his medical technologist wife; a pilot and her husband, a businessman who reads The Dialogues of Plato in his beach chair; and a structural engineer and his wife. And then there is the quirky law enforcement officer who keeps his own apartment like a desert environment and has come to the project directly from his pet tarantula, snapping turtle, and tiger salamander.

The 80-page briefing had described our task in thoroughly endearing terms: “Earthwatch team members will help the newborns reach the water safely.” These “newborns,” or hatchlings, would be the next generation of a species that had co-existed with the dinosaurs and now faced biological extinction. threatened around the world by beachfront development of their nesting grounds, egg-eating predators, rain-immersion of nesting soil, tidewash, shrimp trawlers, plastic garbage bags that resemble the jellyfish, their only food, and human poachers. Turtle eggs raided from a nest bring quick money in many countries from impotent men and also from pregnant women hoping that eating turtle eggs will safeguard a pregnancy. Sometimes the nests are raided, and sometimes the turtle is turned upside down and slit open for her egg sac. Even when the turtle eggs do survive to bring forth hatchlings, only 1 in 10,000 is estimated to make it through the first year.

My team will see to it that as many hatchlings as possible get that chance. We will tag, time, and measure, adding to the scant body of knowledge of Dermochelys coriacea. We will count her viable and non-viable eggs, move her endangered nests, and keep poachers away. And if we are lucky, we will see the last of the laying turtles and the first of the hatchlings. After a 60-75-day  incubation period, a clutch of leatherback hatchlings will bubble up from the nest, as many as one hundred in five minutes, scramble over each other, and race towards a moonlit sea.

The first night out comes so swiftly that no one has a chance to think. Heeding briefing instructions, we grab insect repellent, canteens, and flashlights, tie raincoats around our waists for sudden tropical downpours, and squeeze onto the back of the Fish and Wildlife pickup truck, ready for adventure. But what a pickup looks like quickly gives way to what it feels like after five miles of unpaved roads with overhanging branches. 

Once on the isolated beach of Sandy Point, our vision of trekking barefoot across pristine moonlit sands is another illusion to give way – this time to tangles of sea grape, spiky coral branches, erosion bluffs, and a waning moon that keeps getting lost behind clouds.

We walk and sweat and sweat and walk. Everything that will later become second nature is torture that first night, as our feet stumble and get scraped, and we huff and strain to see, and the stillness on the west side of Sandy Point bothers us as much as the roaring winds on its south side. When the rains come, they come suddenly and fiercely.

As I stand sopping with the others through the third downpour of the night, I decide to head for the shrubs and trees rather than remain in the path of the lighting bouncing down the beach. One of the principal investigators spots me and follows, calling out between the thunderbolts, “Get out from under that tree!” I move to the urgency in her voice, leaving the slight shelter of the trees. I am cold from the rain, hot from the all-night patrol, exhausted from having been up for 26 hours, and disappointed because there are no turtles.  I remember the liability release I’d signed and the personality profile I’d filled in; what were those jaunty phrases about my flexibility and my sense of humor? Either would have come in handy for the next pronouncement. “I think,” came the voice of academe, “that you are standing under the poison manchineel tree.”

Poison manchineel, I discover in the next frozen moments, is common on the island and quite harmless – unless it rains. Then, it drips a substance which acts like battery acid, etching itself into any skin it might touch. So. This is what they meant in the liability release when I agreed to hold everyone “harmless against the loss of health” unless an act of theirs was “wanton or reckless.” But hadn’t I, of my own “wanton and reckless” volition, sought shelter under the trees? I could have stayed with the others on the beach, prepared with advance knowledge of how to dig myself rapidly into the sand should lightning bounce my way. And hadn’t I always known not to stand under a tree in a lightning storm? I shudder heavily, shudder again lightly, and then surrender to darkness, storm, heat, lightning, sand, and poison manchineel.

As the sky lightens, our team soggily returns to the pickup that had deposited us ten hours earlier. We ride back clutching the sides of the pickup, our thirst for adventure nearly slaked, while our principal investigators blithely sing the praises of birding in the salt pond nearby.

The second night out gives us the real impetus to keep going. Around midnight, we come across tracks that are neither human nor ghost crab. They are hatchling tracks. Bunches of tiny scratchmarks leading to the sea. And there, in the sand, we find one small straggler, unlucky enough to have been suffocated by the sand or by the mad tramplings of siblings. It is so beautiful as to cause a hush, such a minuscule grey-black version of its kind, flippers and white markings all in place. Our first leatherback, three inches long.

Later that evening, we get to make the comparison between this first tiny find and the six-foot adult. She arrives unseen and silent. Adapted to sea life, she moves laboriously on land on her elbows. She drags the weight of her body to get above the high water line, and every few minutes, she stops to heave a ragged sigh. Nearsighted on land, she searches out her nesting place. When she is satisfied, she begins to body pit, her front and back flippers thrusting with mammoth strength to make a comfortable  nesting area for herself. But she is too close to the water line, and the pit she creates is destroyed by an aggressive wash of sea, like my sand castles on the beaches of long ago summers. Unaware of the creeping tide, I would build my castle ever higher, ever more intricate, ever more beautiful, only to have it leveled by the lashing of one cruel wave. Surely, this sea turtle will soon reach her level of frustration.

She turns her body several times, seeking out the safe spot. Each time, she begins her furious instinctive motions, and each time is thwarted by a single wave. We watch her in the moonlight, as she finally gives up, stopping only to be tagged and measured by our principal investigator. Finally, she reenters the water, a dark hulk, resurfacing just once for air, then disappearing into her element. It is 1:30 a.m. and if anyone is out of their element, it’s us. Nothing more occurs during our patrols that night.

Perhaps too little turtle at night focuses attention on what we can do with our days. We hardly manage to sleep past noon, and while we are awake, we think a lot about eating and drinking, since breakfast, lunch, and dinner all have to be squeezed in between noon and 7 p.m. On our list of things to bring on the expedition was a favorite recipe. I have brought a recipe for Elephant Stew. It calls for one medium-sized elephant, brown gravy to cover, and salt and pepper. The instructions say to cut the elephant into bite-sized pieces, add gravy, and cook about four weeks at 465˚.  Amusing, until I discover that turtle-meat stew and turtle-skin pocketbooks are among the reasons the leatherback is an endangered species.

I put away my funny recipe and settle into feasting on sweet potato pie plumped with local mango and papaya, fried conch made from the meat of a regulation-sized conch we’d tracked while snorkeling, and dolphin. Our dolphin order at the fish pier nearly makes me bring out my funny recipe for elephant stew, but then I remember that dolphin, fish is not dolphin, mammal.

Continued
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