Lending a Hand In Playa Las Tortugas

Flores Peregrina scoops out sand from under the tail of this turtle, digging down about eight inches, then gently begins removing about 40 perfectly round eggs the size of Ping-Pong balls.

We crouch and watch from behind as, one by one, about 60 more eggs drop into the sand pit the turtle has dug. Flores Peregrina begins handing me eggs, which I put into a plastic bag.

When the movement of her front flippers indicates she's done, we back off. She laboriously fills the hole with sand swept by her front flippers, then she repeatedly lifts and slams her body to the beach, compacting the sand.

After she lumbers awkwardly back to the water, the other visitors leave. Flores Peregrina walks north along the beach on foot. I head south, riding on the back of an ATV driven by Flores Peregrina's assistant, Emmanuel Miramontes.

We ride along the upper edge of the beach, guided only by the light of the moon as we look for either the turtles or the tracks they make dragging their heavy shells over wet sand. About five minutes out, Miramontes suddenly stops and turns off the engine. First I see the tracks leading from the surf, then follow them with my eyes until I spot the turtle about 20 feet away.

We watch while she uses all four flipperlike legs to dig a hole. It's a massive effort, and we can hear her grunting. She rests, then pulls herself farther up the beach and digs another hole. Apparently, the first hole wasn't good enough. Miramontes explains that she probably didn't like something about the sand -- too wet, or too dry. The second hole is just right, and we can hear soft moans as she drops her eggs. When finished, she, too, hammers her body against the nest -- an apparent attempt to hide its existence. In fact, once the surf comes up and covers her tracks, there would be no way to distinguish the patch of sand she's mussed with any other patch.

Once she makes her way back to the water and disappears, we approach the hole and dig up 102 eggs.

Black-Market Eggs

In four hours, we see four turtles laying eggs, and find four other nests by following turtle tracks. As we pass back and forth along the length of the beach, bordered on one side by cliffs and on the other by a river that runs into the Pacific, we occasionally pass Flores Peregrina in his solitary patrol. He, too, carries bags filled with eggs. A small group of Mexican marines also crisscrosses our path. They've been invited by Flores Peregrina to deter poachers, and on occasion they arrest one.

One measure of the effectiveness of the patrols, Flores Peregrina says, is that the price of a black-market turtle egg has jumped in recent years from the equivalent of 10 cents to $1.

In addition to collecting eggs and releasing babies, Flores Peregrina visits schools and encourages the children to protect turtles, and in fact all animals.

"This is primarily an agricultural area, and people are still worried about the basics, like what they are going to eat today," says Flores Peregrina. "They tend to have no loving attachments to animals. A lot of people don't even give names to their own dogs. But we pass on the ideas of patience and caring and the importance of these species. Sometimes in class a child will say, 'My father's a poacher, and I'm going to tell him to stop.' That's how you make change."

When the basket attached to the handlebars of the ATV is filled with bags of eggs, Miramontes and I drive to the incubation shed. We fill one cooler for each nest's worth of eggs, alternating layers of sand with layers of eggs. Each cooler is dated, the number of eggs inside noted.

In about 50 days, one egg in a cooler will hatch and give off a chemical that will alert the other pre-hatchlings that it's time to come out. Eggs in the coolers stored in the incubation shed, which is kept at a constant temperature, have a hatch rate of 94 percent. When room in the shed runs out, Flores Peregrina and his staff and volunteers bury them in a fenced yard.

Slightly more than eight out of 10 of those eggs will hatch. That's still better than nature, where even without poachers, about 74 percent of turtle eggs hatch. Flores Peregrina figures that if no one collected the eggs at Playa Las Tortugas, stray dogs, feral cats and poachers would destroy them all.

The female hatchlings that are released on Playa Las Tortugas and survive the dangers of the ocean for eight to 10 years will return to this exact beach to lay their eggs. I doubt that I will be here to see them. But the next evening, as we release the newest batch of turtles hatched that day, I wish them luck in their perilous journey. I say a little prayer that each mother, on her return, will find a tortuguero waiting to greet her.