The African Environmental Film Foundation is working on a documentary about a man on a quest to save sea turtles. His name is Kahindi, and he works for the Watamu Turtle Watch in Kenya. Along with monitoring sea turtles while they come ashore to lay eggs, Kahindi also visits the local fishing villages, spreading the word about the importance of protecting the large amphibians. Thanks to his efforts, many fisherman now hand over turtles that get tangled in their nets.
Over at Filming Wild, Simon Trevor, head of the African Environmental Film Foundation’s production team dispatches his latest report about filming Kahindi and the turtles. The crew was desperate for a shot of a turtle laying eggs. As the production neared its end, they had yet to capture the event. Here’s Simon on what happened:
A female turtle returns to lay her eggs on the same shore where she was born, sometimes many years after the moment that she took that first gigantic step in her life of swimming out to sea as a tiny hatchling. She would have been one out of a thousand siblings to have survived and, in the interim period, would have covered hundreds, if not thousands, of miles of ocean. (Astonishingly, male turtles never return to land after they leave their natal beach.)
Once a turtle returns to her birthplace to lay her eggs, she will come ashore as many as four times, with intervals of ten to fifteen days between each laying. She can deposit as many as one hundred eggs at a time. This knowledge gave us a better chance of being in the right place at the right time to film a nesting turtle but the odds against us were still formidable.
One particular turtle came ashore at 1:30am, but was not spotted until she was already on her way back out to sea. Having spent many exhausting hours searching the beaches over several consecutive nights, Lesley was bitterly disappointed to have missed the turtle coming ashore. But, as the Watamu Turtle Watch ‘watchers’ knew, turtles sometimes come ashore but return to the sea without laying their eggs. This behavior is known as a “false crawl”. So they all decided to wait and see if she would return again that night somewhere along the same beach… Read more and see photos…
Tracking sea turtles
As you can see, capturing sea turtles on film is no easy task. In NATURE’s “Voyage of the Lonely Turtle,” filmmaker Wallace J. Nichols discusses the year-long process of tracking Adelita, a female sea turtle, as she sojourned 9000 miles across the Pacific Ocean, from Mexico to her nesting grounds in Japan. Read the interview…
How do sea turtles know how to return to their familial nesting grounds from thousands of miles away? NATURE’s guide to the ocean’s most remarkable navigator has the answer.
