She drifted 500 yards offshore in the warm, tropical eastern Pacific ocean off Ostional Beach. Just fifteen years old the olive ridley sea turtle was in a small land that Christopher Columbus had named “Costa Rica”, the “rich coast” 500 years earlier.
The moon was in its last quarter. The afternoon December rains had given rise to gentle moonlight as she waited expectantly, unaware of the lunar effect bringing her near.
As it has done for countless years, the moon was silently passing through its timeless phases. Though she could not know it, it was drawing this olive ridley turtle ashore. She was not alone. At first, a few yards away, another Pacific sea turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, now tens of thousands of marine sea turtles. For more than 100,000,000 years it had been thus: vast migrations of ancient creatures, culminating when the moon was in this phase.
Only a few months ago, this marine turtle was swimming way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, in the second week of April an ocean tramper ship had passed her more than 2,500 miles offshore. On that same day, the hundreds of thousands now alongside her had been distributed throughout several million square kilometers. But, nature is forever mysterious and this year was no exception.
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 inexorable compulsion to return to Costa Rica. They, and she, were all going 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 race back to Ostional Beach since before the first dinosaur.
This sea turtle was somehow returning to the very beach where had hatched in 1995. No one knows how a Pacific marine turtle finds the exact beach where she started life. Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters in length. Now part of Costa Rica’s Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is probably the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site in the world. Indeed, the year this turtle hatched, about 500,000 females had come ashore to nest here in massive “arribadas.”
For 20 years, the mother of this olive ridley joined massive Costa Rica arribadas every year and she would have done so again except that she drowned in an illegal shrimping net just a few weeks before. Thousands more died by long line commercial fishermen. Even more died awfully by swallowing plastic bags carelessly discarded. So many have been killed, the race is endangered.
Of course, the tens 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 look in awe at the sheer magnitude 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 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. Arribada.
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