Photos – Dennis C Merritt

The Night of the Turtles

I got to spend another week in Cancun getting more work done at (product placements coming) Cancun Dental Specialists. I stayed at the Flamingo Resort hotel which is right across the street. The dental work was good, as was the resort, but that’s not what this is about.

Walking along the beach one day I saw some strange tracks.

With a groove down the middle between two scalloped rows…

I wondered what could have made them. They all connected the sea and deep, freshly dug, depressions, three or four feet in diameter.

And then I thought — Sea Turtles!

A woman with excellent English and a French? accent came out from a condo on the beach where I was standing. She saw me taking pictures and came out and explained.

It was turtles. They come out at night and lay their eggs which then take weeks before they hatch. But there’s a problem. Frigate birds, which I loved watching fly, were hanging out just waiting for baby turtles to eat.

Hmmm, is that why I saw so many when I first arrived?

They have a six to seven foot wing span..

So, she and her husband would wait for the turtles to hatch and gather them up and hold them until dark, when it was safe to let them in the ocean.

There were also conservationists who would ride up and down the beach on ATVs and collect the eggs and put them in nurseries. There was one at the Flamingo hotel.

Each with a sign documenting the date the egg was collected, so they would know when they would hatch.

She said they saw turtles at any time of night, after sunset, before sunrise and in the middle of the night.

So I decided to go and look. The first night I went out after dark. I saw nothing. The next night it rained. The following night I woke up at 2 AM and thought, I’m going to look for turtles.

I walked one way down the beach, seeing some fresh tracks but no turtles. I turned around and headed back, with a half moon hanging over the ocean. As I was walking, I saw a small light down by the water. A flashlight of a person? Too dim. Some phosphorescence? Too regular. Maybe moonlight reflecting off the back of a turtle???

Maybe you can’t see the small circle of light below the moon light, but I could.

I approached and in the dark, saw a big old turtle crawl from the water’s edge over the sea weed. I watched as it lumbered along. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest.

I wanted to watch the whole drama unfold, but really? This turtle was moving sooo slow. OK, OK, I have nothing else to do. I didn’t want to use a light because in the 1960s movie Mondo Cane they said artificial light confused the turtles.

But I couldn’t help myself and took one flash photo. I was behind and the turtle was making its way up that steep mini-cliff that ran along the beach. It didn’t seem to mind.

The iPhone takes surprisingly good night time photos. Well, still dark, but here you see the turtle digging its nest, throwing up sand.

And crawling away, the white on the left of the nest is the underbelly of the turtle.

Compare to the photo above, you can see the turtle has moved further away.

And then it returned to the ocean. I tried to capture the turtle wading into the sea in the moonlight, but you can’t see the turtle in any of them. Here though is some glint of moonlight off the turtles back as it approached the sea. The same lighting that first drew my attention.

The next day I wanted to go back and see the nest of the turtle I had watched. On the way I saw this evidence of another turtle’s work, covering resort beach chairs in sand as a result. Yes, there were nests all in and about the resort’s chairs.