Sea Turtle Oversight Protection

~This is the first article in a series about our guide Ann’s involvement in Sea Turtle Rescue, which will be continued in future blog posts and issues of our newsletter.~

I will never again underestimate the power of the mind.  The power of fierce determination, the strength created by teamwork, what can be done when people can depend 100% on each other.  I will never again think that a problem is too large and that I am too small to make a difference.

Like so many things it just began, without looking for it or even knowing about it.  On an early June morning in 2007, Siouxzen WhiteCloud made her way through the humid darkness to a Deerfield beach to teach yoga.  As she crossed A1A a sight awaited her.  It was not a new sight, it had happened a hundred, a thousand times before, but this time the right person was looking.

Stretched in front of her, covering the four lane beach road, lifeless in the darkness of the fading night, were hundreds of run over baby loggerhead sea turtles.  Following their perfect instinct to go towards the light of the moon and the stars reflecting on the sea, they had poured into A1A pulled west by its glaring street lights and were killed at just a few minutes old.

That day Siouxzen and her husband, Richard, called every sea turtle organization in the country, looking for help, guidance, reasons, answers.  And that night they took their three year old daughter, Teakahla, and went out on the beach and sat next to a loggerhead sea turtle nest.  Of the thousands in Broward County, they could cover at least one.  Scheduled to move to New Mexico in two days, they changed their life plans and decided they could not leave Florida until the sea turtle hatchlings of Broward County were safe.

Richard launched into intense research of the coastal lighting problems and infractions, of the shortcomings of the Broward County contractor assigned to oversee the sea turtle conservation program and started a grass roots group of volunteers who were willing to not sleep.

I remember the email I got that June saying the turtles were in trouble, if you can help call this number.  And I remember a few nights later sitting next to a loggerhead nest in Deerfield Beach, next to Siouxzen as the hatchlings bubbled up and without hesitation headed west to the dune vegetation and the condo lights behind them.

It took several more summers of walking the beach all night with our red lights, buckets and FWC permit to get to the summer of 2010.  It took hundreds and thousands of more baby sea turtle hatchlings dying in streets, parking lots and dune vegetation before Sea Turtle Oversight Protection,  S.T.O.P., http://www.seaturtleop.org, began to change things.  Before we found Justin Gould, our web master and Starbrite Corporation who lent him to us along with a hundred buckets and endless support.  Before we got the attention of FWC, FWS, the news media, national conservation groups and the world.  Before we got our four infrared night vision cameras and caught in real time the nightly disorientation of sea turtle hatchlings compiling volumes of never before collected real time data.

But it took much longer than four summers, it took years and decades before someone said on the second most important nesting beach in the world for loggerhead sea turtles: The endless, massive nightly slaughter of sea turtle hatchlings on Florida beaches and in Broward County, being drawn west by the extensive illegal coastal light has got to STOP.

~This is the first article in a series about our guide Ann’s involvement in Sea Turtle Rescue, which will be continued in future blog posts and issues of our newsletter.~