We have a group chat for all of the members of our field team. It’s a diverse crew that includes CSTN, our partners at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, students, and volunteers.
And at this time of year—now that sea turtle nesting has begun—it starts to fill with screen shots of where “our” turtles are now, sent by Dr. Mike James, the lead scientist in DFO’s sea turtle unit.
These texts are one of my favourite things. Even after almost 25 years of studying sea turtles, Mike can’t contain his excitement.
If you ask him, as I did today, why he remains fascinated, he looks a little quizzical. Like: How could you not be?!
And before he answers, he wonders if you are looking at a map this moment of where the turtles are. “Let’s see!” he says, pulling one up instantly on his phone, moving his fingers expertly across the screen to focus in and take a closer look.
“Rihanna,” he says. “Well she’s getting ready to nest. Look at her.” He enlarges the image and nods. “In the last little while she has spent a lot of time within a kilometre of the coast. She hasn’t been that far inshore since she was tagged in Canada. Where will she nest exactly?” he sits back and takes his eyes off the screen. “Could be anywhere along that east coast of Trinidad. We hope she nests up at Matura where she might be encountered.”
“But Cass,” and he’s back, looking intently at the screen, considering the Columbus Channel, which streams between Trinidad’s southwest coast and Venezuela. “We’ve never had one of our turtles head up into the Gulf of Paria before.”
And then quickly he is texting colleagues in Venezuela and Barbados familiar with that area to show them screen shots of the map and to get their thoughts. They text back almost immediately. There is a brief flurry of communication. Smiling, Mike puts his phone down.
“We have had a Canadian turtle nesting in Venezuela before, which we identified using her flipper tags, but never one that we’ve watched head up into that area. Of course, she might also nest anywhere along that south coast of Trinidad, too.” He’s back on, enlarging satellite imagery of those south coast beaches. He pauses.
“By this time of year, given when our field season ends, we haven’t seen the leatherbacks in seven months,” he says. “So knowing that they’re occurring on land where they might be encountered by people—that someone might be able to recover the tag for us and can directly observe that animal—is something to really look forward to. It also generates a lot of excitement amongst our nesting beach collaborators, and I love the international collaboration.”
And then he reminds me about Charlotte, a turtle found by our colleagues at the St. Croix Sea Turtle Project. Charlotte was the first nesting leatherback of the year there, hauling up on the beach on Friday. She is a special turtle, whom they have recorded nesting 52 times over the last 25 years—an incredibly long nesting history.
I think part of what is amazing about this time of year in the turtle world is how many of these stories—the Rihannas and the Casses and the Charlottes—crop up. How they link us with delight and wonder and tie our human stories to their turtle ones—the sheer number of texts pinging happily between different countries and turtle people like so many fireflies on a dark night.
On another note, I have been thinking recently about a poem by W.H. Auden that I love called “Musée des Beaux Arts.” (The New York Times recently published a terrific consideration of it that’s worth a look.) The opening lines of the poem are:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully alongI am conscious that while we are marvelling at the satellite tracks of sea turtles, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine are trapped in a living, terrifying, violent nightmare. Every day I worry that my texts to my friend Sergiy in Odessa, Ukraine, will go unanswered.
I am writing and thinking about sea turtle conservation. I am working on it every day. But to be clear, I am also praying hard for peace.