Jaguars in the Bushes
And the Smell of a Sea Turtle
Benji always said you could smell the turtles before you could see them. Maybe it was my terrible sense of smell from a life plagued by allergies, but I had a hard time believing him. I was one of the new guys after all, just starting my month long stay at the Jalova field station, and it felt like one of those jokes you pulled on the new guy. Years later though, after working many more summers with sea turtles, I can confidently say he wasn’t lying.
Jalova consisted of a few questionably screened in wooden shacks on a remote stretch of Costa Rican coastline. Buffered from the jungle by acres of coconut palms and topped with rusting tin roofs, the field station was just a few feet from the beach, but miles from the closest town. With only a generator to pump water and provide power for a few hours each night, it was about as off the grid as you can get. Creaking floor boards and rooms choked with clothes lines (not that anything dried in the humidity), it wasn’t much, but it was home for the rotating crew of 25.
Benji and James were two of the head managers of the station, making sure everyone was safe and the research went on as planned. No easy task considering we came from no less than 6 different countries, a mash of cultures residing in a few old shacks. But they bore the weight of our differences with ease. Benji, the laid back Italian and James the soft spoken Brit, both gave off a certain magnetism that made them the center of the group, though neither of them cared to be.
One of the main projects we worked on, and the one Benji had been referring to, was the sea turtle nest monitoring research, and my first night on the job would be one I would never forget. It’s been nearly 10 years since I was there, but I remember it just as vividly as the day it happened.
In the pitch black night we set out in single file. Heat lightning snapped across the sky as we walked, illuminating a low ceiling of clouds over head. We headed east, toward the sound of the ocean until our feet reluctantly met the soft sand. By nights end our legs would be weighted and we would pour mounds of the volcanic sediment from our shoes.
The night was thick and we waded through the salty humidity, our clothes already clinging to our skin like wrappers on melted bars of chocolate. Reaching the packed sand near the waves we turned north and began our patrol.
Though each of us wore a headlamp it was kept off to avoid disturbing the nesting turtles we hoped to find. Only when we found one and only when she had begun laying her eggs, would we turn on our red-tinted lights.
Until then, darkness ruled the world.
No shortage of tripping hazards existed before us. Relentless nets of morning glory vines carpeted the sand. Driftwood, from small branches to full tree trunks laid scattered at our feet, mixed among massive holes dug by nesting turtles.
As we walked though, it wasn’t the trees or vines that my mind kept jumping to, but something else all together. As my eyes struggled to adjust to the night I couldn’t help envisioning another pair of eyes that were perfectly suited for it. A pair that could likely be watching at any moment.
At the time I didn’t realize I was working on a world renowned sea turtle nesting beach. Tortuguero, Costa Rica is a remote stretch of beach on the Caribbean coast with the highest nesting population of green sea turtles in the world. The father of sea turtle biology himself, Archie Carr, would set up one of his very first research projects here the 60's, and the work has continued ever since.
Previous to the trip, I had never actually seen a sea turtle in person before. I didn’t know what I was looking for or what to expect. I had no idea how big these animals could get, how they laid their eggs, or swam, or where they spent their time when they weren’t on the beach. My reference points then were probably Crush from Finding Nemo and freshwater turtles back home, neither of which gave me much to go on.
The sky shattered with another bolt of lightning and we briefly glimpsed the world ahead. As it flickered, the people in front of me moved as if walking through a strobe light, flashing in and out before returning to night.
Black ocean, black sand, black shadows, golden eyes.
I’d never known a darkness so complete. It was like walking with my eyes closed and as the minutes past I waited for my night vision to settle in, but every strike of lightning set me back.
Instead of my eyes, I came to rely on the sound of swishing pants and stumbling feet in front of me. The beach was like a roadway, the wash of the ocean to my right and the faint silhouette of the jungle to my left. Roughly 50 yards wide, it stretched out ahead like this, uninterrupted for the next 15 miles.
Waves ended their oceanic crossing at our feet, sending shockwaves through the beach that rolled into the forest, final bursts of energy quickly swallowed by the jungle.
In this manner we groped our way through the night, blindly following our leaders, trusting their experience and our own judgement. With every flash of lightning I caught a glimpse of the group ahead, always further away than I thought, until suddenly I could sense everyone close by.
Someone had seen something up ahead and as we formed a loose circle another flash showed an object moving on the beach. Low and slow, it was a green sea turtle moving in to lay her eggs.
Quietly we made our way over to her as she began the long process of nesting. As we huddled a few yards away I bent down to get a better view and was promptly blasted in the face with sand from one of her powerful flippers. I was shocked at just how big she was. Massive exhales and a giant shell, this was a modern day dinosaur I was getting to watch.
Once she had begun laying her eggs we started our work, and one of the most important things we had to do was triangulate the nest so we could excavate it in a few months. In order to do this someone had to hold one end of a measuring tape over the nest while another walked the opposite end of the tape to the vegetation line. There, they would tie some flagging to a branch and record the distance. After doing this at three different spots we would then able to triangulate where the nest was when we returned.
Sounds easy enough, right? Imagine for a second though, you’re miles from no where, in the middle of a foreign country and its your job to triangulate the nest. As you walk away from the group in the dark only a shallow circle of muted red light leads the way. Your colleagues voices slowly fade and as you get closer to the jungle you remember those golden eyes and the stories everyone told you about them.
It just so happened that there was another project we were running along side the nest monitoring research, and that was a study on jaguar predation on sea turtles. There’s no other place in the world that big cats feed on sea turtles like they do in this region of Costa Rica.
We weren’t the only ones interested in the turtles.
I had heard stories of the crew working up a nest and hearing a jaguar growling in the bushes or how they silently walk between you and the group while you triangulated the nest, only fresh paw prints in the sand to tell the story.
It was a thrilling experience, and though I would never actually see one myself, their presence was felt daily. From paw prints left all over the beach, side by side with our own, to the dead turtles, killed by one of the big cats earlier in the night.
Out there, at night, thoughts of jaguars rarely left my mind.
In the end, the turtle we found would lay her eggs and slide back into the ocean, her biological duty complete for the time being and free to run the gauntlet of jaguars again. We would continue working throughout the night, documenting and measuring nesting turtles until the early hours of the morning, slumping back into bed as the sun came up, with sand in our eyes and jaguars in our dreams.
