Ephemerica

After our last post, we left our bikes and extra baggage with our friends in Heredia and headed to the village of Parismina on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. We had to take two buses and a boat to get there;the second bus drove us through two large Del Monte banana plantations (the bus actually stopped once to let a conveyor belt with bananas on it cross the road). Parismina is just south of the Tortuguero National Park and Tortuguero Village, which is a more famous place to encounter sea turtles. When you get to the end of the road in Caño Blanco, it’s like being in the bayou—there are canals and rivers that connect small communities that are only reachable by boat.

We had decided to volunteer with ASTOP (Association to Save the Turtles of Parismina) for several reasons. One was that they offered homestay opportunities with local families in the village; the other was that it was one of the more reasonable in terms of costs (some organizations charge thousands of dollars per week to volunteer!). Soon after we arrived, we were acquainted with our host family, two sisters with four children between them. We were told by the volunteer coordinator that our family had asked for volunteers because one of the children had broken her arm when she was younger, and the doctor somehow managed to reverse the two bones of her forearm when he set the break (it didn’t seem to bother her, but it was somewhat disturbing to behold when she moved it). Anyway, they were trying to save money to take her to San Jose to consult with a doctor to try to fix her arm.

They began putting us to work right away—we spent a couple of hours that afternoon (and over the next several days) helping build a new turtle egg nursery on the beach because the old one was at capacity. This organization is a little different than some of the other ones we looked into because of the high level of community involvement. We found that this had advantages and disadvantages. About 50-60 people participate in the program, mostly as guides who walk the beaches at night with the volunteers. Having a sense of ownership of the program, as well as seeing how the turtles can be a tourist attraction, bringing money into the village, are some of the good things. However, the population is not particularly well educated, which means that it is difficult to collect consistent, meaningful scientific data on the animals that could be used to bring in research money.

Our first night ended with the event we had been waiting for—the beach patrol. Usually there were two 4-hour patrols each night, from 8-12 pm and from 12-4 am (patrols were more frequent when more volunteers were available). We started on the late shift, not knowing what to expect. We knew that July was a transition month, as the egg laying season for Leatherback turtles was ending and the season for Green turtles was just beginning. The Parismina group patrols a 6 km stretch of beach, and each night we just walked up to one end, and then turned around and came back. The first night we walked, it was so dark (the moon had gone down below the horizon and it was cloudy) that I thought we would never see anything. I shouldn’t have worried—when we saw our first tracks they were so big we nearly fell into them! A Green turtle had come up on the beach, but decided for some reason not to lay eggs, just turning around and heading back into the ocean. We were excited and ready for more, but we didn’t see anything else that night. After our day of manual labor and walking 12 km of beach, we were quite ready to go to bed at 4 am when we returned.

The rest of the week basically followed the same pattern; we would get up late, eat breakfast, watch some telenovelas, eat lunch, work on the nursery, eat dinner, watch some telenovelas, go walk the beach—all the while trying to stay cool and avoid getting bitten by mosquitos. We also had our hands full during the days trying to keep the kids entertained. Although three of the four were of school age, they never had more than 2-3 hours of school a day, so there was plenty of time to play soccer/tag/cards, wrestle, swim on the beach, etc. There was a “turtle hut” that served as the group’s headquarters; we would escape there for a little while during the afternoons when we were exhausted from playing with the kids. We would ask the other volunteers how their patrols went, and it seemed for a while that the turtles would always show up during the shift that we weren’t on. We saw tracks of various turtles, but no turtles and no nests over the next few days.

By the end of the week, we were starting to get disheartened (and really tired). We could have taken a night off from patrolling, but we were convinced that if we did, we would somehow miss out on something. But then finally on our penultimate night, we came upon a Green turtle that had already dug out a nest and was laying eggs. They say that the turtles can be really jumpy about deciding to nest when they come up on the beach, but once they actually start laying eggs, they go into a sort of trance, where you can touch them without disturbing them. And this one was absolutely deathly still as it was laying eggs. We let the turtle finish laying, cover the eggs with sand, and head back out to sea before we took action. Our guide started digging into the sand to recover the eggs—ordinarily, they would go to the nursery if there was room, but tonight they would have to be moved to a hidden nest so that poachers wouldn’t discover the nest. When the guide got to the eggs, he asked me if I wanted to pull them out of the nest, so I got down and reached into the hole he had dug (which was just about the length of my arm). I started pulling out the eggs gently one at a time, but after digging around a bit, I realized that there were a LOT of eggs down there, and started pulling them up 2-3 at a time…they felt a little bit like squishy, deflated ping pong balls. There were 105 eggs in all! Our guide had dug another deep hole nearby, and into the hole the eggs went. This all took a long time, and the next patrol had caught up to us by that point, so we got to go home a little early, very elated that we didn’t take the day off.

On our last night of patrolling, we hit the jackpot again, this time seeing a Leatherback turtle on the beach. This was very unexpected, as they seemed to think that the season was pretty much over. The beast was immense; its shell alone was 1.5 meters long! This delivery would be a little trickier though…when we found the turtle she had come ashore where the beach was partially eroded, and there was a meter-high sand wall keeping her from getting up to the drier sand away from the water. So she started trying to dig a nest at the water’s edge, and every time she would start to make progress, a big wave would come in and fill the hole with seawater. Leatherbacks are one of the more endangered species of sea turtles, so we decided to take some extra measures to help her out. Our guide had the idea of trying to build a sand wall around her to try to block the waves, so we all (me, Cindy, the guide, and a couple from Australia) got down in the sand next to the turtle and made a wall. It helped a little, but wasn’t enough against the crashing waves. The turtle started to turn around toward the beach, and we thought she was giving up, but she managed to position herself in a way to help our dyke efforts, and then continued on her nest. The guide pulled the eggs out of the nest as she laid them, 3-4 at a time, and put them into a plastic grocery bag. As we were relocating the eggs, our guide told us that the eggs would have never survived being buried in sand so close to the water (essentially, they would have drowned).

Although we never did see any turtle hatchlings, we felt pretty good about our time in Parismina at the end of the week. Unfortunately, we heard from our Australian friends that on a bus along the coast after leaving Parismina somebody came on board offering them turtle eggs, so we’re definitely fighting an uphill battle :(  But we were definitely ready to head back to the cool altitude and the unbugginess of Heredia. We’ve spent this week getting ready to hit the road again. We are going to be a bit lighter from now on, shipping some of our rarely used camping equipment back to the states. Hopefully, it will make us that more able to outrun the banditos From here it’s back to the Caribbean coast and the Panama border, and the archipelago Bocas del Toro. And then on to Panama City, and our next continent!

Posted by Matthew on August 2nd, 2007 | Filed under: Costa Rica