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\n An olive ridley sea turtle hatchling lurches along the sand to the sea in Velas, India.<\/p>\n
Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n
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Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n
VELAS, India \u2014 Little kids giddily squeal as a baby sea turtle, flippers flapping, lurches toward the water with the grace of a drunk lunging for a cab at closing time. Tourists applaud as about a dozen more palm-sized hatchlings stumble into the sea.<\/p>\n
The tourists had gathered at daybreak on an April day for the Velas Turtle Festival, on the western Indian coast, where volunteers invite visitors to watch them release baby turtles from a hatchery \u2014 like an animal pen on the sand.<\/p>\n The volunteers collected the eggs from turtle nests on the shore, effectively holes that females dig with their flippers, and where they lay dozens of eggs at a time. The eggs are taken inside the hatchery to protect them from predators, such as dogs and gulls.<\/p>\n Once the babies hatch, they’re released under supervision to ensure the predators don’t pick them off as they crawl to the sea. Even after all those efforts, most of them will be killed by predators in the waters. Only one out of every 1,000 olive ridleys<\/a> is likely to ever reach maturity.<\/p>\n The slim survival rate of olive ridley sea turtles comes with other pressures that have left them listed as “vulnerable<\/a>” to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, even as they inhabit a global band of tropical waters. And for decades, conservationists feared their populations would collapse across India. They were suffocating after being caught in fishnets \u2014 turtles need to come up for air, just like humans. They were slaughtered at scale<\/a> for meat and leather. Their eggs were poached.<\/p>\n \n Olive ridley turtle hatchlings are placed in a bucket after they were collected from a hatchery by volunteers.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n \n A sign welcomes tourists to the Velas Sea Turtle Conservation Area, in the western Indian seaside village of Velas, where olive ridleys come to nest.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n \n Tourists watch and take videos and photos as olive ridley turtles crawl into the sea, in Velas, India, in April.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n Kartik Shanker, a leading Indian sea turtle expert and author of From Soup to Superstar<\/a>, says around 20 years ago, conservationists counted no more than 100,000 turtle nests across the country. The threats to olive ridleys “were significant, and if they had been allowed to continue unabated, we may have seen the crashes that we were predicting.”<\/p>\n “But when some measure of protection was put in place,” he says, “these turtles, olive ridley turtles, have rebounded.” During the past winter’s nesting season, he says conservationists counted “about a million nests, which is crazy high.”<\/p>\n Protection efforts in India include seasonal fishing bans<\/a>, protected coastal zones \u2014 and events like the Velas Turtle Festival.<\/p>\n It attracts visitors like IT specialist Anuja Bhingare, who took an overnight bus after seeing the festival on Instagram. “It’s very nice to see baby turtles taking their first step into their home,” she says. Her friend, Madhuri Dixit (no relation to the Indian movie star<\/a> with the same name), says she worries that if more tourists come, “they will make the place dirty,” by throwing trash on the beach.<\/p>\n \n Mohan Upadhye, the founder of the Velas Turtle Festival, poses for an image in his home in the western Indian village of Velas painted with the area’s main attraction: olive ridley sea turtles.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n \n An advertisement for the Velas Turtle Festival in the western Indian village of Velas. The festival is an eco-tourism project that invites visitors to watch olive ridley sea turtle hatchlings enter the sea.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n \n Olive ridley hatchlings crawl along the shore by the western Indian village of Guhagar after they were released from their protected hatchery by volunteers, in April.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n Garbage is a problem, acknowledges festival manager Virendra Ramesh Patel. He says he pays villagers to keep the beach tidy \u2014 about the equivalent of $3 per week.<\/p>\n Patel says a lot has changed here. His grandparents used to poach turtle eggs to make omelettes with coconut milk, tomatoes and onions. “Chicken eggs are dull in comparison,” he laughs.<\/p>\n The festival began with luck about a decade ago, says founder Mohan Upadhye, who sports a turtle tattoo emblazoned with “save me.” Conservationists thought olive ridleys had disappeared from this area decades ago, but in the early 2000s, a<\/a> worker from an environmental charity<\/a> stumbled onto a turtle egg shell nearby.<\/p>\n Soon, Upadhye was helping the charity identify turtle nesting sites and he fell “in love with sea turtles,” he says. He convinced the Velas council to ban seaside construction to protect nesting sites \u2014 because some of the surviving females born on this beach will return to lay<\/a> their own eggs. Olive ridleys uniquely will sometimes nest in a synchronized event known as arribada<\/a> \u2014 Spanish for “arrival” \u2014 where more than a thousand turtles, sometimes tens of thousands, nest on the same beach over a period of days, including on the eastern Indian coast of Odisha<\/a>. Upadhye says it’s why<\/a> protecting nesting sites is key to protecting the species.<\/p>\n \n Volunteers check that all turtle hatchlings have entered the sea after they were released from a hatchery.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n \n Trash is strew on a nesting site used by olive ridley sea turtles. The species is vulnerable to extinction but some efforts in India have helped their numbers improve. Still, garbage is among the human-made obstacles for the turtles.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n \n Tourists gather around a netted hatchery on the seashore at the western Indian village of Velas, where olive ridley turtles come to nest.<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Diaa Hadid\/NPR<\/p>\n Upadhye set up hatcheries and incentivized conservation efforts by establishing the turtle festival. It lasts for the two-month hatching season that starts in April.<\/p>\n While olive ridley populations have rebounded across India, they still face grave threats. In January, hundreds of dead turtles washed up near the eastern city of Chennai. They appeared to have suffocated <\/a>in fishing nets of illegal trawlers. They face newer problems<\/a>, like eating plastic dumped in the ocean, which Upadhye says they seem to confuse for “their favorite food \u2014 jellyfish.”<\/p>\n And Shanker, the turtle expert, worries that now that their numbers appear to be rebounding, there will be more pressure to loosen protections. “I can see a Port Development Authority saying, why shouldn’t I build a port here? You said that the ridleys were endangered, but apparently they’re not.”<\/p>\n Shanker hopes more conservationists can work with local communities to profit from the turtles’ rebound \u2014 whether through eco-tourism like Velas, or sustainable harvesting of turtle meat or eggs.<\/p>\n Much of the effort to protect India’s sea turtles traces back to one man<\/a>: Satish Bhaskar. A documentary about him was released this year called Turtle Walker<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Greetings](\"https:\/\/npr.brightspotcdn.com\/dims3\/default\/strip\/false\/crop\/1080x1080+186+0\/resize\/100\/quality\/100\/format\/jpeg\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F77%2F94%2F6316826c494b8ab92ed5ea1a4763%2Ffarflungpostcard-dhadid.jpg\")
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