Turtle hatchlings touch the heart

THIS is eco-tourism that puts mere beach holidays in the shade – John Coomber has a hands-on experience at a turtle rescue project in remote Cape York.

New beginnings ... a baby turtle heads for the sea after hatching on Flinders Beach on the western side of Cape York, Queensland. Picture: John Coomber/AAP

YOU walk towards the setting sun holding the precious parcel in your hands.

A few metres from the sea you stop, crouch down and gently reunite the baby flatback turtle with the beach that gave her life.

The warmth of the Cape York sand and the smell of the sea triggers something inside the brain of the turtle. Her tiny motor, idling since she first emerged from her shell 48 hours ago, shifts up a gear and the little flippers flail at the sand beneath her.

More than 100 million years of genetic imprinting has brought her to this moment – her one chance of life. She will use every fibre of her strength to take it.

Her mother's egg sack has given her enough fuel for three or four days of swimming. She will use it to propel herself out into the Gulf of Carpentaria and if, somehow, she survives her first days and begins to feed, she may reach maturity.

Thirty or 40 years later that same mysterious force that now drives her into the sea will draw her back to this beach. She will lay her eggs in the sand and the process will start again.

The chances of her surviving that long are, however, very slim. Even if everything happens according to plan, only one in a thousand sea turtle hatchlings will reach breeding age.

Even for 70-80kg turtles, the danger is not yet past. Sharks and crocodiles take their toll and the very beach where the turtles breed is strewn with evidence of another more insidious killer: ghost nets.

These are lost or abandoned fishing nets from Indonesia and elsewhere which wash around the Gulf currents in a clockwise direction trapping turtles and other marine life in their deadly tangle.

The nets, all but invisible in the water, kill over and over again as they are deposited on beaches only to be put back into into the cycle by the next big storm.

On Flinders Beach you can see nets with several seasons of turtle remains in them.

You try not to think of what awaits your turtle. For some reason she had been unable to fight her way to the surface of the nest when all her siblings emerged at high tide the previous night. They had the advantage of being part of a convoy. She does not.

The Cape York turtle rescue project has at least given her one more chance. She would have died in the nest had she not been one of several collected by the research team that night and held in a box of moist sand until the conditions were right for release.

All of them are females. The sex of turtle hatchlings is determined by incubation temperature – cooler for males, hotter for females. The darker sand of Flinders Beach absorbs sufficient solar energy to ensure that virtually all of its hatchlings are female.

Now she is lurching down the sand runway, leaving miniature tractor marks behind her. Occasionally she pauses, lifting her head a fraction to sniff the sea and check her bearings.

Before long a wave laps over her and the backwash lifts her from the sand and carries her into deeper water. She is on her own.

What you have just witnessed – participated in – is something that happens countless times every day, yet we seldom give a moment's thought to.

In this little ceremony is a microcosm of the life force that drives all creatures, plants and organisms on earth: the unending struggle to survive and replicate.

If it doesn't make your heart swell and your throat tighten, perhaps you should stick to Surfers Paradise.

The point is not lost on marine biologist Ian Bell, turtle conservation officer with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. Like all scientists, his daily work is measured in data; in dispassionate, observable facts.

Yet he has never lost his sense of wonder at these remarkable creatures and shares quite readily in the emotions experienced by visitors to the Chivaree Turtle Conservation Camp.

Bell is aware that not all agree with the ethics of scientists intervening in the processes of nature. Our little foundlings would have perished in the nest had he not excavated it the previous night after seeing the telltale tracks their siblings had left on their way down to the sea.

"These animals have so much loaded against them – mainly as the result of human activity – that I believe we have a moral obligation to help them," he says.

"Fossil records show they were here before the dinosaurs. They have survived for 120 million years and they have reached the point of disappearance in what amounts to the blink of an eye."

Six of the seven species of marine turtles in the world nest and feed in Australia. All are listed as either endangered or vulnerable.

Flatback turtles are endemic to northern Australia and are found nowhere else.

"These turtles are as Australian as echidnas and koalas," says Bell, who goes out night and morning with Aboriginal head ranger Lawry Booth to record the comings and goings of flatback, Olive Ridley and hawksbill turtles nesting and hatching along the 24km stretch of Flinders Beach.

It's about as remote as you can get in coastal Australia – on the western side of Cape York Peninsula about 400km from the continent's northernmost tip.

Far from the pristine breeding site you might imagine it to be, Flinders Beach is in fact something of a turtle war zone.

Feral pigs and wild dogs do enormous damage, predating around 90 per cent of turtle nests on the beach. Or they did until Bell and his colleagues began protecting the nests with pig exclusion devices – robust plastic grids anchored over nest sites.

No metal is used because it might interfere with the setting of the internal geomagnetic compasses that allow these animals to return to the same beach to lay their own eggs. How they do it is not yet understood.

The breeding turtles dig a pit about 60cm deep and, using their hind flippers with exquisite dexterity, fashion an egg chamber another 40cm or so deeper into the sand before covering up the site and disguising the location as best they can.

They are no match for the pigs' acute sense of smell. A pig will break open and eat every single egg – around 55 for a flatback nest and as many as 120 in other species.

What the pigs don't get, the dogs may.

Another integral part of the Cape York Turtle Rescue Project is the collection and destruction of the ghost nets, which regularly wash up in their hundreds.

Visitors are encouraged to join in, just as they are welcome to join the scientists and rangers patrolling the beach, tagging nesting females and logging details of eggs, nests and hatchlings.

As awestruck as you might be by the experience of releasing a baby turtle, it is perhaps matched by being able to lie on the sand beneath a star-laden sky while a metre or so away a female turtle digs her pit.

We tracked one from the moment she emerged from the sea and were able to witness the entire nesting process. As she dug into the sand we lay silently around her, listening to her laboured breathing.

Using a red light, which is less likely to disturb the turtle, we watched her construct her egg chamber and leant over to watch her deposit 50 or so glistening, perfect eggs into the sand.

After she had covered them and began heading back towards the sea she was tagged and measured. We installed a pig and dog excluding device over the site, took a GPS reading and marked it for the day around seven weeks later when the hatchlings would emerge.

It would then be their turn to try to beat the odds, just like the one you released a few hours earlier.

The last you saw of her she was about 15m offshore, paddling westwards for all she was worth.

The author was a guest of Tourism Queensland and Qantas Link. Thanks to the Aboriginal community of Mapoon.