A Turtle's Tale

My senses have led me here. Here, the waters are warmer, enticing me towards the breakers. I have swam a long way, and I am now laden with eggs.

I used to feel safe in the darkness of the night, but these days, many hidden dangers abound - more than many of the ancestral tales I've heard. It was only just the other day that I saw how a pink plastic bag floating on the surface was eaten by my fellow turtle - hungry for jelly-fish. It clogged up his intestines and he died.

Or what about the tales we've heard of being netted by the fishing boats - entangled amongst the other creatures of the sea. Death by drowning.

We are the Dermochelys coriacea, noble creatures from the dinosaur age of mammoth reptiles. To you, and some of the fishermen who hunt us for our meat and oil in certain parts of the world, we are known as the leatherbacks.

My senses have led me here, but there are lights ahead and I'm afraid. I am laden with eggs and I have to swim on. I must look for a dark and quiet place - without the lights, without humans, for they are the greatest of predators who collect and eat my eggs.

The memory of two years ago haunts me now as I search for a place to land and nest. Two years ago, with a nagging sense of hesitance, I braved the beach. My intuition was right. The people descended upon me and I was petrified.

They followed me and cornered me. I felt disoriented and tried desperately to return to sea. They became angry, and surrounded me. They were everywhere. Will they ever know the humiliation of being prodded and even jumped on?

I am a noble and beautiful leatherback. My shell, or carapace, is smooth, like leather, and it is marked with seven longitudinal ridges - marks of distinction. Our backbones and ribs are embedded in our shells. We are tender and spiritual beings. Why do the humans hurt us so?

I never laid my eggs on land that year. I had managed to abandon the horrible scene. I returned to sea. I had nowhere else to approach for the lights from the fishing boats lining the coast deterred me. And when the urge overcame me, I released and lost my eggs in the sea.

I am now moving towards my nesting site. The beach appears dark, and hopefully, empty. I make it over the waves. My flippers touch sand, that soft, and strangely familiar feel of the land. The sand feels right, and now I have to select my course up to the dry mid-beach sand.

I am heavy, 438 kg to be exact, and my laborious movements up the steep slope towards the tide-free zone has been described as "crawling", or "lumbering" - two rather distasteful terms for a being as majestic as I, don't you think?

Having selected the perfect nesting site - free of vegetation and above the high-tide mark, I begin to sweep the area with my flippers. My front flippers perform most of the clearing.

I begin to excavate a pit for myself. Now, my rear flippers are hard at work, digging my nest cavity. It feels almost perfect. The sand is not caving in. However, a horrible feeling intrudes in mid-concentration (nesting, as you may well sense, is a spiritual act which requires full concentration).

It's those two-legged predators again. But, it's too late. I am already laying my eggs and some guy behind me is collecting them as fast as he can. Determined to finish my work, I lay the final layer of infertile eggs in an attempt to protect my fertile ones below and begin to cover and pack my nest with sand. You may laugh and tell me it's futile, but it's part of my nature to fill my body pit and conceal my nesting site.

It is with a weighted heart that I select my course - amidst all the prodding, pushing, patting, and hysterical laughing (at me, at Me?!) - and head back to the dark comfort of the sea.

As I re-enter the surf and cross the breakers, I reflect on the exclamation of a young, female, human predator: "Look, mummy, the mummy turtle's crying". True, in a very personal way. Though it is rather normal that we turtles shed tears as a way of keeping our eyes moist, she was not wrong that I was crying, crying inside. And that's the deepest form of grief, when you are crying inside.