Listening

(May 3)

My friend Lex is a Nova Scotian fisherman and a gifted photographer who has helped with our sea turtle conservation work for many years. He returned to his home country, Ukraine, when the war started. He helps do the very dangerous work of distributing supplies and offering safe passage to people trying to flee from occupied areas.

Today on his (public) Facebook site he wrote, “No human should ever live through what I have witnessed here.”

It feels like there should be space around that sentence. The quiet of a gentle, grey ocean on a day with no wind. All of us listening.

So for now, what I can think of to tell you is that in the early hours of this morning, the team in Trinidad saw a turtle we had first worked with off Cape Breton in August of 2013. She was seen nesting in Trinidad in 2018 and then again in 2020. That’s when Kyle and the team satellite tagged her. They named her Grace. Here is a snapshot of her satellite track.