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She was only fifteen years old 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.

The afternoon October rains had slipped away as she waited in anticipation. In its final quarter now, the moon was having an unseen effect upon her.

A dozen yards away, a second olive ridley sea turtle joined her, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, and soon tens of thousands, all waiting patiently. For epochs the moon has graced the earth with its everlasting phases that affect the world’s tides-and today it was bringing her ashore this night, just as it had led her forebears to ancestral nesting beaches for more than 100,000,000 years.

There is something magical about nature. A few months earlier, this marine turtle and the tens of thousands now alongside her were scattered across the Pacific Ocean, some as far away as nearly 3,000 miles.

Although there was plenty of food far out in the Pacific, something had begun to stir within her. Hundreds of thousands of marine turtles felt the same timeless need to return to Costa Rica. They, and she, were all going back to where they had hatched.

Now, months later, she waited in the soft moonlight just a few hundred meters from her destination. She was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had traversed, she had come across several different male olive ridley sea turtles in the clear tropical waters and bred with them in the deep ocean. Like her, they too were being affected by something unseen, a force nearly as old as life itself. It was something so compelling that her race had been going back to the same Costa Rica beach since before the first dinosaur.

In the tropical night this olive ridley sea turtle was waiting. She had somehow found to 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 big. In fact 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. Incredibly, in 1995, the year this turtle hatched, some 500,000 female olive pacific sea turtles had nested here in huge waves. These massive invasions are called “arribadas.”

Unfortunately, our sea turtle’s mother will not join her to nest at Ostional this year even though for the last two decades, she had been part of massive Costa Rica 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. And, no one knows how many thousands died unnecessarily by eating carelessly discarded plastic bags. And, of course, there has been the wanton 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 at least a mile. We stand in awe at the sheer numbers of God’s creation. They don’t know or comprehend that they were on this planet long before there was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They don’t know that we 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 dig up nests and take 1,000,000 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, though no one knows why, it happens. As quietly as they first appeared, as silently as they gathered, their patience has been rewarded and they begin to come ashore. A single olive ridley turtle followed by a second. Then there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—even more than that—each intent on one task: bringing new life. All night they come. And all day, day after day. It is a wonder of magnificent Costa Rica and as timeless as the phases of the moon. It is the spectacular display of life called Arribada.

Tags: Adventure Holiday

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