On the Trail of Sea Turtles in Mexico

There are a few epic travel tales that I’ve known about Bruno for as long as I’ve known him. They’ve been repeated, misty-eyed, so many times they are etched in my mind like family legends.

One of them is about the sea turtles of Mexico. It goes something like this:

On his last trip around the world, Bruno found himself on the Pacific Coast of Mexico with a few friends, bush camping on a beach. They had rigged an outdoor freshwater shower with a tube from a nearby water source, allowing them to spend a few weeks there rescuing baby sea turtles. With the help of locals, the group of friends scoured the beach for newly-hatched baby sea turtles and protected them from the nearby dogs and birds as the babies scurried to the ocean. The children in their group didn’t even want to eat lunch because, during that time, the birds were feasting on baby turtles; the adults in the group even helped mama sea turtles up the steep beach in the middle of the day so they could lay their eggs; at some points, the group simply grabbed giant handfuls of baby turtles and released them into the water.

The experience had been profound for Bruno and his friends, which obviously explains why this story has become such a mythical family tale. It’s probably why I’d searched so enthusiastically (albeit in vain) for sea turtles in Oman and Turkey several years ago. It’s also why, as our family of three finally approached the locale of Bruno’s Mexican turtle tale, my quest to experience sea turtles firsthand reemerged.

Michoacan is one of the best places in the world to see sea turtles. The state has stood up to big tourism, with essentially no resort towns along their 200km stretch of pristine turtle-laying beaches. This is important because for sea turtles, when it’s time for them to lay their eggs, mama turtles return to their birth-beach thirty years prior. What they often find are resorts, cities, or industry – in other words, too much light pollution, noise and development for the turtles to calmly and safely birth, a ritual they’ve been accomplishing for millennia.

Our first turtle stop along Michoacan’s coast is Maruata. We head to an eco-center run by the local indigenous population, which, from Bruno’s tale, had been doing a far better job than the government at protecting the sea turtle population. In this instance, the eco-center is quite simply a group of run-down palapas under coconut trees, covering a dirty, litter-strewn tract of sand. On the other hand, the beach, which is more of a cove book-ended with smooth, flamingo-hued rock, is absolutely stunning. And, there are tons of sea turtle nests and tracks.

As I learned back in Oman in 2015, sea turtle tracks look like tire tracks, and their nests like big holes in the sand that a child could make with a decent set of sand toys. If you don’t know what you’re actually seeing, the marks of an active turtle-nesting beach could easily be overlooked.

In Maruata, there are more turtle tracks and nests than I’ve ever seen.

That night, after the sun goes down and I put Phoenix to bed, I set a towel down on the beach and sit. Honestly, I’m not expecting much. I’d done a nighttime sea turtle vigil before, and hadn’t seen a thing. To me, spotting sea turtles laying their eggs is no easy feat.

That’s why, thirty minutes in, I need to squint and strain when I see it. There’s a half-moon lighting up a clear night sky, and it’s enough for me to notice movement off to my right. It’s a sea turtle, slowly plodding up the beach toward the palapas! I freeze in place, afraid to scare her away, but when I finally see the sand flying that is a sign she’s digging her nest, I sneak up to tell Bruno to bring his camera!

We spend the next two hours on that beach. One by one, sea turtles emerge from the sea, heaving themselves up the beach, rhythmically flapping their flippers down into the sand until their holes are a meter deep, and grunting their eggs out. As a mother, my heart goes out to them so hard – I can feel them struggling to call forth the energy necessary for this all-important task, and following the same instincts that guided them back to their birth beach in the first place. As I watch their bodies convulse to get each egg out, I feel spiritually connected to them, and I affirm within myself, You can do it, mama. Honestly, birth is the most magical rite to experience.

Eventually, a local man approaches. With my sub-par Spanish, I understand that he works for the turtles, monitoring the beach at night. After the turtles lay their eggs, he says, they dig up the eggs and bring them to one centrally-located safe beach where they are protected until they hatch. I am heartened by this, because Bruno had had to chase several stray dogs away as the turtles trodded up the beach. I had been contemplating the idea of sleeping on the nest of the first turtle, but when three more emerged, the issue had arisen as to which nest I’d choose. Instead, I head off to bed trusting those eggs are in the safe hands of the locals, happily drunk on the incredible miracle I’ve just witnessed.

The next morning, the first thing I do is race down to see the nests in the daylight. To my horror, soft, still-warm egg shells are strewn about the sand, dog prints littered among them. My grief is mixed with incredulity and confusion – why were these eggs not protected?

The thing is, those eggs are precious. Besides being the precursor to adorable turtle life, sea turtles quite simply have it tough. Besides dogs and other hole-digging predators, baby sea turtles are on a literal race for survival the moment they are born. Birds circle the skies, waiting to pluck up newly-emerged turtles by the thousands. If the baby sea turtle actually makes it the few hundred feet down to the water, fish await there, mouths wide open. It is said that only one in a thousand baby sea turtles reaches adulthood. I think sea turtles have the worst odds of any wild animal there is.

Nature had adjusted for these cruel odds by giving turtles incredible egg-laying potential. They lay around 100 eggs in each nest (or “clutch”), and can lay up to nine clutches in a season. The math demonstrates that the survival of the species was a given – until man showed up, that is. Between beach development, commercial and net fishing, plastic pollution (sea turtles mistake plastic bags, for example, as their favorite jellyfish food, swallow them and choke to death), sea turtles had almost gone extinct. It is only with recent efforts, which start with protecting the precious eggs, that turtles have made a phenomenal recovery worldwide.

Standing on the beach, my heart breaking over each life that was squandered before it even had a chance, I decide I don’t want to witness this again, so we move up the coast a bit, to El Faro. There are some turtle tracks here too, but fewer, as it’s a more developed beach. Bruno doesn’t think we will see any turtle action here, but I decide to do another night vigil.

It’s cloudy tonight, so I can’t see as much. After about 90 minutes, I’m ready to head in when I see a bright light in the distance. It’s a flashlight on the beach. I race to it, and arrive just in time to see three local tourists trying to release a baby sea turtle into the ocean. The baby is confused because of the bright light, and keeps racing toward it rather than the sea, but eventually the tourists turn off the flashlight and the baby runs into the wave and is off.

Apparently the tourists had been having their evening barbecue under the palapa when three baby turtles emerged from the nest beside them. The tourists had carried them down to the water’s edge, and that’s what I’d caught the tail end of. I sent a silent prayer to the universe that these three lucky early birds would make it past the fish unaware.

The next morning I awake to 70 super itchy bites all over my skin from having sat out at the beach the previous night. Sand flies, or worse. Grossed out, we decide to move on. Bruno had saved the GPS points from his epic turtle-rescuing mission twelve years before, so we decide to visit. At first, he can’t find the right path, but eventually we find our way down a dirt road, through a papaya and hibiscus farm, down to the beach. He immediately recognizes the little lagoon where they friends had swum, the abandoned stone construction at the clearing where they’d parked their two vehicles, and the fresh water source they had rigged their outdoor shower to.

Suddenly, a man appears – the owner of the land – and Bruno asks him if he remembers them. At first, he doesn’t, but eventually the memory reappears, and the two men smile and hug and shake hands. I take photos of this happy reunion. The man (who had a really long name that I can’t remember) asks us several times to come stay on his land again, but when he visits our bus he sees that we would never make it down that narrow 4×4 track. Too bad, because there are so many turtle nests on this beach that we would have been sure to spot something. Plus, I think it would have been really special for Bruno to stay here again, now with his little family.

Instead, we just wander around. We walk on the beach, and spot vultures and dogs waiting off in the distance. The beach is so littered with soft sea turtle shells that it almost looks white. I run after two dogs, who are busy digging up a nest, the birds waiting patiently above for the dogs to do the dirty work. Phoenix and I rebury several warm eggs as deep as we can, all the while knowing it’s in vain. Those dogs are better diggers than we are.

The man tells us that the villagers have already saved enough eggs for the season that they leave the rest to the birds and dogs. I realize that must have been the case in Maruata, too. And, though I still find it sad, I have to concede that these locals obviously know what they’re doing, because, judging from the number of egg shells here, their turtle populations look healthy.

We drive off with a mix of so many emotions – wonder, satisfaction, anticipation, disappointment and heartbreak. Bruno has returned to old stomping grounds, and I have seen both nesting turtles and a baby turtle scurrying to the sea. But I’m still feeling the profound pain of all those unborn turtles, and the harrowing feat they live with in their first minutes of life. Plus, compared to Bruno’s epic experience twelve years ago, mine pales, of course. It’s too early to try to rescue newly-hatched baby turtles, and we have a Christmas date with my parents further north.

I thought I might stumble across another turtle-nesting beach in Mexico. I thought, perhaps, our turtle adventure would continue. That’s why I held off writing this story. I was waiting for a true conclusion.

But, as seems to be the case when I write about sea turtles, our story ends here, for now. It’s now late January, and though we’ve been to many beaches in the last 6 weeks, we haven’t spotted another sign of turtles. Turtle-hatching season is almost over, and in a few days, we’ll be in the southwest United States. I think our search for sea turtles has come to yet another close. It might be for the best – I may be too sensitive to see the heartbreak of watching baby sea turtles get eaten by birds.

But then again, if I can help save baby sea turtles – even one – then I think Mexico’s turtle coast may have to, once again, be in our future plans.

If you enjoyed this story, please do consider checking out the piece I wrote about my search for sea turtles in Oman, featured in Green Global Travels. I think it’s one of my better pieces of writing. Here’s the link.