The Turtle Country

Jan 20, 2010
After a big breakfast of gallo pinto, pancakes and water melons I walked along the beach in the morning picking up trash. I used the opportunity to dive in the ocean and just hang out for a while. The beach was calm although the sand was not the prettiest. We were told that a white sand beach is not too far from here.

Turtles come to nest every year on this beach, known as the Playa de Ostional. Of the seven species of sea turtles around the world that are all endangered, only the leatherback, green turtle and olive ridley come to this beach. Turtles are amazing. Female turtles (turtuego for the locals) come to lay eggs on the same beach they were born. When the turtles come to the surface after hatching underground, they only have a few minutes before they go into the sea. Twelve to fifteen later when its time to lay eggs, they can trace back their path back to the same beach. Its just amazing how they can do that. I can’t even remember how to get to Sears in Seven Corners and I was there just a few weeks ago.

The turtle conservation program in Ostional is also pretty amazing. This is a great example of how to make any local project successful: by working with the local community hand in hand. The Universidad de Costa Rica has a research unit in Ostional in conjunction with the community. A certain percentage (I think its five) of the eggs harvested every year is given to the locals as turtle eggs are part of their livelihoods. People have been eating turtle eggs for generations. The conservation program has nicely coexisted- with the university helping poachers from illegally getting the eggs and the locals helping the university with the research program. ­

In the afternoon, I took a stroll around town which basically consisted of three shops and some open space. I also grabbed some cold medicines and had conversations with the locals while at the shop. We talked about the earthquake in Haiti. The Ticos down here didn’t hesitate to ask us what we thought of Bush. Conversely I asked them about Obama. The locals seemed to think that more tourists came to town when Bush was in power. It’s interesting how they thought the two could have been related. I tried to explain the economic situation with all the Spanish I knew and they seemed to understand, or they may have just nodded. Who knows?

One of the volunteers offered us to tag along with her for beach-patrol at night. During the patrol I learned quite a bit about turtles and the conservation program in Ostional. It seemed clear to me that the program was a success because they had chose to work with the locals and give them a fair share of the resources. Leatherback apparently hasn’t had a successful nesting in three years. So they maintain a nesting place where eggs collected by volunteers and hatched and released later. The program also hires locals as assistants, who work to protect the turtles. However at the end of an hour long patrol, we didn’t see a single turtle. There had been a “false crawl”- a turtle had come to the beach a few nights ago, but apparently didn’t like something there and returned to the ocean without laying eggs. So we were hoping that she would come again, this time to actually lay the eggs. However, that didn’t happen that night.