BY JOSLIN BERTRAND & ROBIN ROBERTS
For millions of years, Mexico's coastal beaches, including San Pancho, have been critical nesting grounds for the Olive Ridley sea turtles. Early residents of San Pancho can recall nights when it was nearly impossible to walk along the beach without having to weave through the hundreds of turtles laying eggs in the warm Pacific sand. Those numbers began to seriously decline, however, as more and more people began harvesting the eggs for food, and slaughtering the turtles
themselves for meat and leather. By 1994, Olive Ridleys not just in San Pancho, but world-wide, had landed on the IUCN's [International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources] Red List of Endangered Species, and it became illegal to possess any part of a marine turtle, including the meat, shell, leather or eggs. With little to no enforcement of the new laws, however, the nests continued to be poached nightly.
In 1992, Frank Smith, a retired Forest Service worker from California, began collecting turtle eggs and experimenting with ways to hatch them in a protected area on the beach. With the help of eager local kids who were rewarded with a truck ride on the beach, (there were very few vehicles in San Pancho in those days), Frank collected 90 nests that first year. Soon after, he co-founded what is now called Grupo Ecologico de la Costa Verde, a Mexican non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the sea turtles and other indigenous wildlife in the San Pancho area.
Today, volunteers come from all over the world to work with the turtles and to be involved in something as important as preserving an endangered species. Grupo Ecologico has hosted volunteers from the United States and Canada, and as far away as Australia, New Zealand, Lithuania, Taiwan, England, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, France, Portugal, Poland and the Netherlands. The San Pancho turtle nursery was one of the first of its kind in all of Mexico, and remains one of the most successful, with an 87% hatch rate due to its unique method of placing the eggs in boxes of sand in a climate controlled environment. Because of the diligent efforts of Frank, and many other concerned locals such as Elvia and Geno, Rocio, Virgilio, Judith Anderson and Laureando Garcia, the San Pancho sea turtle population has rebounded significantly - nearly 1,200 turtle nests were collected in 2009 alone.
Since June 24, 2011, Grupo Eco has collected over 300 nests and released almost 200 hatchlings. The first nest of the season hatched on August 5th.That same night, 36 hatchlings were released into the sea at sunset, as a crowd of 70
onlookers cheered them on their long journey. With luck on their side, in about 15 years those same hatchlings will return to these very same shores, and start the cycle all over...and Grupo Eco will be here to welcome them home.
