The turtle diaries

It was on Easter Sunday that we watched the march of the baby turtles.

A troop of some 88 hawksbill turtle hatchlings made their way down a carefully landscaped beach pathway on Turtle Island at sunset — each about the size of an iPod Nano, entering the surf by instinct, where their flippers set them forward into the churning Palawan waters.

All of them made it to the surf, thanks to the cheering and helpful guidance of beach onlookers, and a crew from El Nido Resort that had been monitoring their hatching until early on Easter Sunday. After that, the turtles will be on their own, which is quite a different journey.

According to the El Nido staffer who explained the hawksbill hatching — in which the baby turtles are released from a large wooden box where they’re protected until all have safely hatched — the process takes place at three hatching sites from March to May each year. The mother turtle, after laying her eggs, typically moves on. That means, without protection, the eggs are easy prey for any roaming form of wildlife, predator birds — or humans.

The hatchlings, once released from the box, start down the slope toward the water, immediately forming a lifelong “imprint” of the location, and this will guide them back here, 30 or so years from now, to breed and hatch eggs again. In the meantime, they will live and feed on floating seaweed patches, and hopefully return to this beach within 10 or 15 years to set the cycle of regeneration going again.

It’s a tiny miracle, watching these creatures orientate themselves to new life. They clamber over tiny depressions of sand, sometimes seemingly lost; then they resume their march, flippers guiding them ever forward. You can’t help thinking of Easter eggs and chicks and rebirth.

They have an avid cheering section. As guests from nearby El Nido, we were all given the option: a sunset cruise, or… watch the release of baby turtles? Wisely, we all chose the turtles.

El Nido takes a leading role here in Palawan, where hawksbill turtles and other marine species are endangered. They run tag-and-release programs in cooperation with the Protected Area Office, and offer interested resort guests Turtle Tracking Tours during hatching season. The “turtle release” part is always a big hit.

I asked how they know where the water is. The turtles use echolocation, a kind of sonar, to steer themselves towards the water. As they arrive at the beach, each lapping wave draws them further out to sea; you watch their necks extend, their tiny fore-flippers retract, and their tiny back flippers start kicking rhythmically. Another brave shot at life.

(Full disclosure: our daughter’s pet freshwater turtle, Cutely, recently kicked the bucket. One minute he was straining his neck on a rock, preening like The Lion King, the next he was stiff and rubbery. We don’t know if it was the recent heatwave or our frequent band practice that made his nervous system implode. People tell me turtles are supposed to live to 100. Not this one; he lasted 4-5 years.)

It was interesting to watch the humans watching the turtles on the beach: they seemed to imprint more than the turtles, forming an instant anthropomorphic bond, cheering the hatchlings on in their life journey. It was like a red carpet down on the beach, cameras clicking wildly (no flash though). There’s instant empathy; some called the release the most beautiful thing they’d seen in their lives.

Truth be told, and metaphors aside, it’s not a sure guarantee of success. The turtle handler explained that only about one percent of the hawksbills will survive; they face predators from the air and sea, plus human predators (hunted for soup and other travesties), and starvation (though their bodies, at birth, already store about two months’ worth of food which they will use for energy); the odds are, sadly, against their survival.

But you have to think that, with environmental monitors such as the ones that El Nido has looking after them, they have a pretty good first chance.