In India, Olive Ridley turtles are being killed in their thousands by illegal trawling. Stephen Tindale, Executive Director of Greenpeace UK, witnessed the effects first-hand and reports on how laws designed to protect the turtles are being used to incarcerate activists.
A full moon shimmers through the palm trees. A gentle, warm breeze blows in from the ocean. And from the sand beneath our feet countless tiny turtles are emerging, as if the earth itself is giving birth.
The mass hatching of Olive Ridley turtle babies is truly one of the wonders of the natural world, and last weekend, during a trip to support the work of Greenpeace in India, I was lucky enough to witness it first hand on a beach in Orissa. Together with a group of forty young men from the local village, we helped the hatchlings find their way to the ocean - indeed the villagers, without ceremony, were gathering up in buckets and chucking them into the sea! This helped them avoid the attentions of the crowds of crows and gulls hovering overhead.
OK, so by helping the turtles escape their avian predators we were interfering with evolution, though there are plenty of dangers once they reach the water to ensure that only the fittest of the hatchlings survive. And anyway, the turtles need all the help they can get. Adult Olive Ridleys congregate to mate off the very beach where they were born, then the females struggle ashore to dig nests in which they lay scores of eggs.
However in recent years those same waters have been heavily trawled by fishermen and tens of thousands of turtles have been caught and drowned in their nets. So the beaches, instead of being beacons of new life, have turned into mass graveyards.
In January Greenpeace set up a Turtle Witness Camp near the Devi River mouth, which used to be one of the three main nesting sites in Orissa. Over the past three and a half months volunteers have recorded well over 2,000 carcasses on this stretch of coast alone. The day after witnessing the mass hatching, at a different location, I walked along the Devi beach and saw for myself the carnage, a sobering and distressing sight.
Because of the trawling there has been no mass breeding at Devi for the last seven years. This despite the fact that the area offshore has been declared a no-fishing zone, so the trawling is illegal. Greenpeace demarcated the no-take zone with specially commissioned buoys and we did our best to monitor what the trawlers were doing. In this we had the support of the local fishermen who fish from small boats, which is not banned. These fishermen regard the trawlers as a threat to their livelihoods.
There are other threats to the turtles. One is from dogs, who dig up the nests and eat the eggs. Another is from a new port development being proposed by the Tata corporation, India's largest. Greenpeace will be working on all threats, but at present our main focus is on stopping the trawling by getting the existing law properly enforced.
To get our message across, last Friday Greenpeace took the problem to the man most responsible, the Chief Minister of Orissa. We placed outside his official residence in Delhi the carcasses of three turtles, together with several more shells, in front of a banner reading: "Orissa's turtles: killed on arrival. Chief accused: chief minister".
He did not appreciate this. Thirteen activists were arrested and though ten were released later that day three were charged, ironically under the Wildlife Protection Act, the very law we are trying to get enforced. Held in a cell with seventy others, ranging from pickpockets to rapists and murderers, they were finally released on Tuesday. But they still face charges, while those fishing illegally in the no take zone and killing turtles seem able to act with impunity.
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Get the full story about the Turtle Witness Camp.
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