She was only 15 as she drifted offshore in the tropical warm eastern Pacific off the tiny beach called Ostional in a country that, about five centuries earlier, Christopher Columbus had named “Costa Rica”, the “rich coast.” She was an olive ridley sea turtle.
She was finally sexually mature.
The afternoon November rains had slipped away as she waited expectantly 500 yards from the beach. In its final quarter now, the moon was having an unseen effect upon her. A few yards away, another olive ridley sea turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, now tens of thousands.
For unimaginable eons the moon has graced the earth with its timeless phases that affect this planet—and those phases, for more than one hundred million years, have drawn marine turtles back to their ancestral homes.
There is something mysterious about nature. A few months earlier, this marine turtle and the multitude of sea turtles now alongside her were scattered across more than a million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, some more than 2500 miles away from Costa Rica.
Though food was plentiful far out in the Pacific, something had stirred inside her. She and hundreds of thousands like her felt the same inexorable pull to return to Ostional Beach. They had to go back to where they had hatched.
Now, as she waited in the soft moonlight, she was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had swum she had been bred by several different males in the clear tropical waters because, somehow, they, too, were being affected by something unseen, a force primeval. It was something so compelling that it had been bringing her species back to the same Costa Rica beach since before the first dinosaur.
In the tropical night this marine turtle was waiting. She had somehow found the very beach where she had hatched in 1995.
We do not know how a Pacific marine turtle finds the exact beach where it started life. There are only a few nesting beaches on earth and they are not very large. Indeed Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters in length. Now part of Costa Rica’s Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is almost certainly the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on earth.
Wonderfully, in 1995, the year this turtle hatched, some 500,000 female olive pacific sea turtles had nested here in huge waves.
These huge invasions are called “arribadas.”
Unfortunately, our sea turtle’s mother will not join her to nest at Ostional even though for twenty years she had been part of massive Ostional arribadas annually. Not long ago, she drowned in an illegal shrimping net on her way back to the ancient nesting grounds. It was a needless waste since it could have been avoided by the simple use of an internationally required, but typically ignored, law requiring a turtle escape device.
Thousands more were destroyed in what is politely called “incidental catch” by long line fishermen who refuse to use larger hooks that would prevent tragedy to this magnificent and ancient creature.
Also, no one knows how many thousands were killed awfully by swallowing carelessly discarded plastic bags. And, there has been the ceaseless pillaging of nests: millions of eggs from just a few small, precious beaches.
Of course, the hundreds of thousands of olive ridleys just offshore know none of this. As we look out over the water in the pale moonlight, there are now so many that it almost seems one could walk on their backs for a mile or more. We have come to this beach because we are interested in Costa Rica eco tourism. And we are not disappointed.
We look in awe at the sheer numbers of God’s creation.
They don’t know or comprehend that they were on this planet long before the first Tyrannosaurus Rex.
They don’t know that people are waiting for them to come ashore so that when they lay their eggs on this tiny wildlife refuge, men, women, and children will legally raid their nests and take one million eggs in return for protecting the rest of the clutches and preserving the species.
They only know that this is where they are meant to be.
Then, as quietly as they first appeared beyond the surf, as silently as they gathered, as patiently as they waited, they begin to come ashore. One turtle, a second, dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—even more than that–lumber onto the beach and nest.
All night, all day, day after day, in a spectacular display of life.
As timeless as the moon itself.