The Last Nest:
Saving the endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle
They are devoted to one mission: Saving the world’s most endangered sea turtle.
The team knows the odds of a payoff — the sight of a nest from the roughly 1,000 female turtles left in the world — is slim.
Still, they press on. They endure long hours on patrol in the South Texas heat searching miles of beach. At night, their work continues as they watch over the nests they do find and wait for signs of life.
Each year they leave their families and the comfort of their homes, sometimes for days at a time, and live in a remote cabin at mile marker 39.
Now as another season comes to a close they remain determined to turn the tide.
A RARE SIGHT
It's 2 a.m. and Tom Backof steps down from the cabin, which sits far from the Padre Island National Seashore headquarters off the Gulf of Mexico.
He carefully makes the 100-yard trek in the soft sand from the cabin to the corral where the last Kemp's ridley sea turtle clutch lays.
Backof clicks on his red headlamp to unlock the fence and walks down the enclosure to the far left corner where the nest lies.
Looking down, he sees 65 hatchlings scurrying in the sand. Hurries back to the cabin to wake the others. The last nest found of the season is reason to lose sleep.
As Backof shook Meg Streich to tell her that the turtles had emerged, she immediately popped up and started to work. Streich put on her National Park Service hat, headlamp and grabbed the transfer box and a binder before heading out into the night.
"After the first nest, you realized you need things in certain areas," Streich said.
Streich begins taking down initial data as Backof sat down next to the nest, and then they began to place sand in the transfer box. Fellow biological science technicians Hunter Handley and Kailee Brown emerged from the dark of the beach to help with the last hatchlings of the 2016 season.
After double-counting the hatchlings and transferring them to a container, the technicians hopped into an SUV bound for the shore to release them into the Gulf of Mexico.
"Hatchlings really respond to bass," Backof said as he hit the play button and Geto Boys' "Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta" filled the SUV.
The group is part of The Division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery at Padre Island National Seashore's Nest detection program that was started in 1986 by Donna Shaver.
Since the early 1980s, Shaver has advocated for the endangered species and is responsible for increasing turtle nests from 700 worldwide in 1985 to more than 185 nests found on Padre Island this year alone. The turtles have been considered endangered since 1970. Though they've since some gains, significantly increasing the number of these turtles, which were nearly wiped out mostly due to a century of over harvesting of eggs, is a slow process.
ON TURTLE PATROL
Kemp's ridley season starts in April and goes until mid-July. Eggs typically take 48 days to incubate. Constant patrol of the beach is a large part of the detection program. The only way to patrol more than 40 miles of beach is to live there. Initially, the group camped out in tents, then a camper before they set up shacks on the beach. In 2000, a cabin was built specifically to house the technicians for the nesting season.
There are about 10 technicians during peak season who rotate out of the cabin. They undergo a two-week training program where they learn how to spot, excavate and relocate the nests. Technicians also learned practical skills they will need for living in a remote location, such as driving a utility task vehicle and a four-wheel drive SUV in the sand. The training concludes with the technicians opening the cabin and constructing the corral for the season.
"It's kind of like resort living in a way and then extreme camping in a way," Streich said.
THE CABIN LIFE
The technicians live in a small solar powered, two-room cabin set back in the dunes during nesting season. Bunk beds line the walls in the larger room and are separated by a long table. This table is where the technician's gather to share meals and play Settlers of Catan, a board game.
"Cabin life is definitely different from regular life in the city, definitely different," Handley said. "No air conditioning … wake up to a nice ocean view every day, so that's kind of sweet."
In an attempt to escape the heat of the non-air conditioned cabin, Handley hung a hammock outside the front steps to sleep.
Living in close quarters with strangers was awkward at first. But that didn't last.
"By the third week, we kind of got used to each other and the group meals started, and we all started hanging out," Handley said. "It's basically like a big group of friends coming all together."
Brown said it's like summer camp and Thanksgiving with the bunk beds and shared meals. There's no generator, but the cabin has everything they need.
"I like to think of it as a humble way of living. It's a structure but it's no more than if you would have built something on the beach using reclaimed wood," Brown said.
BEATING THE ODDS
The team relocated 33 nests maxing out the corral's capacity with the last nest being found on May 31. By the end of the four-month nesting period, technicians released more than 2,000 hatchlings. Shaver said there are plans to construct a larger corral for the 2017 season to house more nests. More than 10,000 hatchlings have been released on North and South Padre Island this year.
"Under natural circumstances, one out of every 400 hatchlings will survive," Shaver said.
With the program, 85-90 percent of the eggs collected hatch and are released while being protected from predators like sea gulls and crabs, she said. Shaver said it’s not easy to know the survival rate of the sea turtles.
“We know for sure the overall low point of the population was in 1985, but the numbers have grown even though we had a set back in 2010 (because of the BP oil spill),” she said. “In 2016, we are up but that does not bring us back up to before 2010.”
After releasing the final clutch, the technicians stayed at the cabin for a few more days. Some will be going to their next assignment, but Streich and Backof are employed full-time at the seashore.
