Turtle Tracking in Costa Rica

IT'S NEARLY MIDNIGHT AND I'M RUNNING BREATHLESSLY THROUGH AN INK-BLACK JUNGLE along a narrow footpath, one that's transforming by the minute into a raging stream. The sky has torn open like a tarp, and the rains are gushing down, fogging my glasses, making it even more difficult to follow the tiny red dot of Jon Willans's flashlight bobbing in the distance.

Moments ago we were blissfully walking in the surf under the yellow glow of a full moon, scouring Costa Rica's Caribbean beaches for tracks of the critically endangered leatherback turtle. A gamelan of frogs and cicadas chimed from the trees lining the beach, and the warm phosphorescent waves swirled like spilled milk over our feet and up the burnished bronze sands. But when a salty wind whipped up mounds of coal-black clouds, consuming the moon, and a lightning bolt hit less than 100 metres up the beach, Willans - a transplanted Torontonian and the manager of Ca–o Palma Biological Station near Tortuguero - marshalled us over the high-tide bank and through the wrack line to the relative safety of the jungle. "We'll run along this path and take shelter at the hotel up the beach," he yelled over the storm.

We slog through the jungle, single file and double time. The sky suddenly explodes again in a blinding ball of blue-white as lightning slams into the electrical wire strung above the path - in the chaos, Willans has forgotten about it or he would have opted for a different route. I look down to get my bearings, only to find I'm knee-deep in a puddle of quacking red-eyed tree frogs. They bob like corks, waving their splayed orange hands as if they were tiny vaudeville singers peering up at me with bulging eyes.

Then it's dark again. We are running right into this mother of a storm, under an electrical line, for Pete's sake!

Craaaack!

The lightning flash and thunder hit simultaneously, so close I can smell ozone. "Come on," Willans calls. "We're nearly there!" Running full out, we turn onto another path, duck into the open-aired lounge of the hotel and collapse onto bamboo furniture. The night watchman proffers stale coffee as small pools of warm tropical rain blossom around our feet on the stone floor. While the pyrotechnics continue, I mentally flip through my list of Costa Rica's most poisonous critters - the deadly fer-de-lance, bushmasters and eyelash vipers. But I can't recall if the skin of a red-eyed tree frog will kill me in a matter of minutes or if death will be a long, drawn-out affair, marked by bleeding orifices and fevered hallucinations of a hell lorded over by Donald Trump.

For years, Costa Rica's docility and stability in the midst of Central America's sea of political and economic chaos has attracted tourists. And today, with five per cent of the world's species shoehorned into less than .3 per cent of the Earth's land mass, the country's biodiversity is the primary draw, attracting more than one million tourists a year and adding more to its coffers than any other enterprise save silicone-chip production. Meanwhile, the ecotourism industry is growing at a dazzling 10 to 30 per cent per year, accounting for one in five tourists worldwide and Costa Rica can honestly promote itself as a leader in the field.

On previous visits I've ziplined through the country's jungle canopies, searched on horseback for toucans in its jungles and lounged in hot pools while watching the Arenal volcano spout crimson lava into the starry night sky. But this time, like 1.6 million other tourists around the world will do this year, I'm squeezing some volunteer time into my touring: one week serving with Global Vision International's (GVI's) sea turtle conservation team at the Ca–o Palma research station, located just outside the Tortuguero National Park boundary.

There are no roads into this northeastern part of Costa Rica, so Tortuguero remains blessedly off the beaten track. In 1980, only 226 tourists found their way to the park; fewer than 100,000 visited last year, most of them to see the turtles. Some 37,000 green turtles alone dig more than 100,000 nests and carefully lay 10 million eggs on Tortuguero's stunning beaches every year.

While most visitors arrive in Tortuguero via a 30- minute prop plane flight from San Jose, our tour guide opted for a more circuitous route. After visiting the gold museum and the quaintly European National Theatre in San Jose, we explored the rainforests north of the capital before busing to the village of Cahuita on Costa Rica's southeast coast. There, we found Rastafarians and hermit crabs roaming the dirt streets and Bob Marley tunes spilling out of every restaurant in an endless loop. The creole lobster and fish servings were superb, as was the day's snorkelling on the reef where we spotted nurse and reef sharks, barracudas and parrot fish, and dodged the spikes of gorgeous black and red sea urchins to pet rubbery sea cucumbers.

In nearby Moin, we boarded a snub-nosed boat in the shadow of a huge Del Monte container ship. Then, for three hours, we rocketed up the Tortuguero Canal, breaking only to watch families of white-faced monkeys forage in the trees and a two-metre crocodile slide off its sunning beach. Throughout we marvelled at the gigantic palm fronds, mangroves and towering purple-pated wild almonds lining the shores, some draped with vines so thick their shape was only hinted at, like cottage furniture covered with sheets for the winter.

Needless to say, now that I'm finally walking through the bamboo orchids on the grounds of Ca–o Palma, I'm eager to spot one of the four sea turtles species that nest in these waters: green, hawksbill, loggerhead and the astounding leatherbacks, huge reptiles that have remained unchanged for more than 100 million years. These behemoths can weigh almost a tonne; the largest wouldn't fit on a sheet of plywood. And unlike other turtles, they have flexible shells, allowing them to survive the intense pressure they undergo while diving to astonishing depths, at times pursuing their prey 1,200 metres below the surface.

In the past, tourists freely roamed the beaches in the park, photographing themselves with the turtles, disrupting their egg-laying and generally adding to the woes of these magnificent creatures. Researchers estimate that because of poaching (turtle eggs are considered a natural aphrodisiac in some cultures), predators gulping down hatchlings, pollution (in one study, 70 per cent of leatherbacks had their guts blocked by plastic bags they had mistaken for jellyfish), long-line fishing (on average, a leatherback is snagged on one of the 1.4 billion long-line fishing hooks floating in the ocean every second year of its life) and shrimp nets lacking turtle-escape devices (at one time more than 55,000 sea turtles were killed each year in shrimp nets in the southern U.S. alone), sea turtle populations have dropped by 95 per cent since 1492. That was the year Columbus wrote of the Caribbean waters near Costa Rica: "The sea was thick with turtles . . . so numerous that it seemed the ships would run aground on them."

Today, access to the park's beaches at night when the turtles are nesting is forbidden without a permit, at least in theory. Enforcement of the law is spotty at best. So while turtle conservation groups such as GVI (and the nearby Caribbean Conservation Corporation) are out nightly monitoring nearly 40 kilometres of beaches and collecting data on turtle nesting rates, they often approach unlicensed visitors, gently offering advice on non-invasive ways to view turtles (use red-light flashlights, wear dark clothing and such). For a fee, the conservation groups also escort permitted visitors on nightly beach patrols, either in special group tours or by allowing one or two to tag along on nightly research walks - collecting data that has added much to our knowledge of the fate of sea turtles. We now know, for instance, that though green turtles nearly went extinct on these beaches in the 1960s (most ending their days in bowls of turtle soup), nesting rates increased by 417 per cent between 1971 and 2003 in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the Pacific, and scientists haven't the foggiest idea why.

So how are the turtles nesting in Tortuguero faring with all these tourist and volunteer visits, controlled or otherwise? That's what I've come to find out.

"Heard you had an eventful night."

Dave Jones, the 25-year-old director of GVI's Ca–o Palma turtle research project, speaks softly and carries a dry wit. He has shaved his pate, skinhead style, but his soft features and cocker spaniel eyes belie a thoughtful Welsh soul. "And don't worry. Red-eyed tree frogs are harmless, except for some reason to Canadians." He smiles. "You're not, by any chance, Canadian?"

GVI runs volunteer programs worldwide, with a focus on practical hands-on research, and Jones has invited me here to join his current roster of 18 volunteers. We'll sleep six to a room and rotate daily through a variety of onerous - but important and scientifically rigorous - jobs: nightly turtle walks covering 13 kilometres; 25-km trudges down another beach in search of turtles killed by jaguars; bird counts in the nearby national park starting at 4:30 a.m.; bog treks where we'll count and measure animal prints and routinely catch the painful nanga nanga rash; beach cleanups to move logs that might otherwise hinder hatchlings from scrambling safely to the sea; and excavations of old turtle nests to count the number of hatched eggs or establish if nests have been poached.

The majority of the volunteers are Brits, so people tend to speak with languid British accents - more often than not in the form of a polite question. ("Are you on Jag Walk tonight, Tom?" or "That would be Coldplay on the iPod, would it not, Fliss?") And because there are camp rules almost beyond counting (my least favourite: not a drop of alcohol on the day of a turtle walk) and a clear hierarchy in camp with Dave Jones perched at the top, it feels like I've walked into Lord of the Flies, though with two significant differences: Ralph is in charge, and there are women.

Another of the camp's rules: we are not to walk off the grounds without wearing closed-toe shoes. But later in the day, when I slip off to a local village with Michelle, another volunteer, to buy ice cream, we flout Jones's authority and wear sandals. Paddling Kinkajou, a canoe so unstable the volunteers have renamed it Sinkajou, we glide over the canal's waters past red and yellow heliconias hanging like bunches of lobster claws in the musty shadows. Then, after checking for crocs (one killed a boy from the village last month) and beaching the canoe, we haven't walked a hundred metres before Michelle screams: her sandal has caught the coil of a two-metre-long, brilliant-green snake, flipping it up around her ankle. It's a satiny parrot snake, not poisonous, but with fangs so large they would have left impressive holes in her leg had the snake not been otherwise engaged: a large toad is struggling in its mouth. We watch, transfixed, as the amphibian disappears, centimetre by centimetre.

At 4:30 a.m. next morning, I groggily stumble to the boathouse wearing closed-toed shoes. An equally dozy sun rises fitfully beyond the mangroves. Soon our "Jag Walk" team boat is slipping down the silky smooth canal through a slice of jungle so idyllic it could be a Hollywood set for The African Queen. The water is stained the colour of root beer by tannins leaching from rotting palm fronds; a sangrillo tree molting upstream has left a bride's train of golden flowers floating on the surface. Our presence sets off a round of guttural roars from a family of howler monkeys. The black slits of a caiman's eyes rise out of the water for a moment, then just as silently submerge. I've skipped breakfast to catch a few more zzz's, so my stomach is enthusiastically returning the howler monkeys' calls.

It takes 30 minutes by boat to reach the start of our walk, and we count more than 20 bird species en route: anhingas drying their wings, green ibises, tiger herons, parakeets and Amazon kingfishers. Only 30 pairs of the great green macaw are found in all of Costa Rica, and we've already sighted three pairs of them. We've barely started the beach walk before we spot jaguar prints, too. Farther on we note leatherback tracks, so wide and deep it's as if a 4X4 has chewed up the beach. But this one has performed a "half moon," or aborted nesting, and returned to the sea - spooked by a light or possibly movement in the jungle. Then we spot the vultures hanging from the trees like plump grape clusters, waiting their turn to tug at the body of a green turtle freshly killed by a jaguar. We collect two sets of cameras strapped to nearby trees - triggered by body heat to monitor the movement of the jaguars and their prey - and head back to base.

"Between 1971 and 1997 there were only two reported turtle kills by jaguars on these beaches. In 1997 there were four. Last year we counted 130 dead turtles. But why is this happening?" The question haunts Diogo Verissimo, GVI's 23-year-old environmental biologist and an anime version of a mad-scientist-in-training. Below a cap of wild chestnut hair, his eyebrows are invading his forehead in search of lebensraum. He speaks in Gatling gun bursts, all the while spinning his short arms in circles or barrel rolls, as required, to underscore his points. And he is brilliant. His statistical analysis shows the jaguars are killing turtles because of loss of habitat, the result of logging stripping the supposedly protected areas to the north. "It's sad," says Verissimo, "when one endangered species feeds on another because of human interference."

Using data collected by the 80 volunteers who come to Ca–o Palma every year, Verissimo is also drawing conclusions about GVI's impact on Tortuguero's turtles. Poaching rates, for example, have dropped from more than 50 per cent of the nests to single digits, thanks to the volunteers' nightly patrols. Translation: some 1,600 more turtles enter the ocean every year on GVI's stretch of beach than did before the organization arrived in 2006. Of course, only four or five of those will survive to return to nest here in 15 or so years in the case of the leatherbacks, 30 or more years for the greens. Then they will mate every three to five years, returning to the beach as many as 12 times in a season to nest. Still, that means thousands of more eggs because of the presence of GVI's volunteers.

But non-volunteer tourists can also have a significant impact on the turtles' lives, says Verissimo. "For example, we know poaching rates are almost nil in front of one hotel at the north end of the beach, where hotel staff work hard to monitor the beach. And when they take their guests out to look for turtles, they have them wear dark clothes and use red lights. The other hotel on the south end does none of that, and poaching rates there are no different than on the rest of the beach. So tourism isn't necessarily bad for turtles. It can help them, in fact. But it depends on how the tourism is handled."

That night, while on another fruitless walk on the beach in search of nesting turtles, I convince myself that maybe the GVI's many rules make sense. In fact, they may be necessary not only for saving indicator species like turtles, but if we are to leave any sort of biodiversity for our children to enjoy. Maybe GVI's approach to social organization - step out of line and you're gone - is the bitter pill we need to swallow as a species if we are to save the planet as a whole. But when I suggest this to Dave Jones over tea in the boathouse the next morning, he politely rejects my thesis as bunk. "Rules work here because we take the time to educate the volunteers. Only then do they conform. If there is any connection to what we do through GVI and what might be done in the greater society, it is education. People need to know what is happening to the environment and why certain rules would work to save it. Without education, you have no buy in, and nothing will change."

Mandy Platts, an effervescent 56-year-old general practitioner from London and the oldest volunteer, has her own take: "When you think about it, we condemn these local people who poach the turtle eggs as being concerned only about the short term, not the long term. But how is that any different from me driving my car to work? It's a short-term gain, saves me time and the like, but it has long-term consequences." She swings for a moment in her hammock, gathering her thoughts. Across the canal from the boathouse, a green iguana loses its hold on a palm frond and plops into the murky waters. "What really matters," she eventually says, "is not what I do for the turtles here, but how I change my behaviour when I get home."

I've signed up for one last turtle walk, my fifth, hoping to finally witness a turtle nesting. For luck, at lunch (my fifth, sigh, without a beer) I sit next to Platts, who a few days earlier witnessed a leatherback rise out of the waves, haul herself up toward the trees and dig a body pit. Once the turtle entered her egg-laying trance and it was safe to approach, Platts then scrambled under the turtle's cloaca (the hole in the tail from which the eggs are dispersed) and caught each pale globe - tallying the number of fertilized and unfertilized eggs for Verissimo's burgeoning database. "It was like the marvel of human birth," gushes Platts.

The night sky starts off full of promise. The moon caresses clouds as delicate as dandelion clocks. Behind them stars pierce an indigo sky. Willans laughs, pointing to a cloud in the shape of a turtle briefly passing in front of the moon. A good omen. Surely I'll see a turtle tonight.

We come across a leatherback track. Willans goes to investigate but returns with disappointing news. "She's done. We missed her by as little as 20 minutes." Our team sets about smoothing the sand, disguising the nest to thwart poachers.

A kilometre or so later another track, this time of a green. Willans disappears beyond the high-tide bank and comes back smiling. "Well, Cam, you're about to see your first turtle." We trundle after him up the beach, to find that the green has finished laying her eggs. Now she is sweeping sand back with her massive flippers to disguise the nest behind her. The team members jump into data-collecting mode. One measures the shell, or carapace. Another checks the tags on her flippers. Yet another takes a GPS for the nest.

We accompany the green as she struggles out of her body pit and leverages her huge bulk back toward the sea. She's magnificent. The moon reflects off her shell, the size of a steamer trunk and hydrodynamically shaped like a Tour de France helmet. She pauses in the surf, as if momentarily savouring her return home from this beach, an alien place she's been drawn to by powerful but mysterious forces. With the fifth wave, she disappears under the ebony eddies in the foam.

"Do you want to name her?" Willans asks. I think of my 14-year-old daughter Maggie on this, Father's Day, and suddenly my cynical heart is filled with hope for her and her world. I'm witnessing ecotourism that goes light years beyond hanging up a hotel towel so it can be used another day. GVI volunteers have boosted the likelihood of this turtle returning to nest again on this beach. With poaching rates down, odds are her eggs will hatch in a few weeks, then her offspring will make their own way to the sea. And it's a sea that is far less treacherous for a turtle than it was 20 years ago - testament to the passionate work of countless individuals around the world. Maybe, when my not-so-little girl is my age, she will come back to this beach and witness the wonder of one of those hatchlings, now fully grown and filled with future life, digging her own nest, blindly using her flippers to delicately carve out a cylinder in the sand "without," as Mandy Platts described at lunch, "dropping a grain."

And so it is that once we're back at camp, we enter the turtle's particulars in the log book. Encounter time: 20:58. Direction facing: East. Length/Width of Carapace: 100.06 cm/90.07 cm. GPS: N-103619.1/W-833145.7. Previously sited? Yes, three times this nesting year. Name (optional): Maggie.

Author podcast at bcaa.com/costarica-podcast
Blog interview with the author at bcaa.com/ww-writers

Cam Sylvester is a professor of political studies and director of the Global Stewardship Program at North Vancouver's Capilano University.

Do-Gooders Departure Lounge

Global Vision International runs more than 120 volunteer projects in 30-plus countries - intense research projects that range in length from one week to one year. Shorter experiences are available through GVI's Responsible Holidays initiatives, with options ranging from working with pink river dolphins in Brazil to community construction projects in Honduras. Both GVI and the Caribbean Conservation Corporation also offer volunteer opportunities working and gathering information on sea turtles in Tortuguero.

insider travel

For any excursions involving a "local payment," travellers and/or volunteers are advised to do their homework upfront by confirming how much of the money will go to local community partners versus admin costs; also, whether or not the organization is involved with a carbon offset program. Trek Holidays' Costa Rica excursions, for example, which the author participated in, follow strict sustainable travel protocols - for both volunteer and recreational-only travel experiences, including:

• 14-day "Costa Rica Encompassed" tour
  San Jose, the Arenal Volcano and Monteverde Cloud Forest, Manual Antonio and Tortuguero National Parks, Cahuita, Lim—n, and Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, a laid-back Caribbean town with unspoiled surfing beaches. $1,020* per person (based on double occupancy), plus local payment of U.S.$300.
  
• 15-day "Costa Rica Conservation" tour
  San Jose, the Poas Volcano, the aboriginal
  ceremonial centre at Guayabo (Costa Rica's most important archaeological site), Turrialba and the Tortuguero National Park - for eight days of
  volunteer conservation work with GVI's turtle and jaguar research programs. $3,310* per person,
  plus local payment of U.S.$350.

*Land only

For more details on Costa Rica travel, including TREK
adventures and airfare, see bcaa.com/costarica or visit
your nearest BCAA Travel consultant (see page 71).