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The Guardian: Richard Gideon
—By Rebecca Clarren
Under a pearl-colored moon, Richard Gideon sits on the beach and watches. A Vietnam veteran and former firefighter, Gideon is practiced at paying a certain kind of steady, quiet attention. The July breeze smells of salt. The kapok trees rustle. The surf pounds with a rising percussion. Finally, a large black rock crawls out of the ocean.
One of Gideon’s turtles has come home to nest.
With a shell that’s almost four feet long, the female green sea turtle drags herself onto the beach, stopping every foot or so to rest. Her breath is audible, jagged. This is hard on her. Sea turtles, which spend the vast majority of their lives in the water, aren’t used to carrying their entire weight.
Gideon notices that the turtle has only three flippers – the fourth sheered in half, likely by a shark. He knows her; he’s seen her here before. Her name is Tripod.
Gideon glances up into the starry sky. “Look, there’s Scorpio,” he says. “He always tells me it’s turtle season. He says, ‘Get your a-- out there and check on them turtles.’”
Gideon, The Nature Conservancy’s land steward in St. Croix, has been checking on the turtles at East End Beach—a remote stretch of sand adjacent to the Conservancy’s Jack and Isaac Bays Preserve—every turtle-nesting season for seven years. Male green sea turtles never come ashore. But throughout the summer, females arrive on beaches across the Caribbean for the sole purpose of laying eggs. Most of them return to nest at the same beaches where they hatched, loyal to place by genetic code.
Tonight, under Scorpio’s watch, Gideon walks the beach at intervals of 15 minutes while Tripod, the green sea turtle, uses her flippers to throw sand in wide arcs as she prepares a nest. If Gideon finds another turtle, he’ll note her location and tag number. If he finds a recent nest, he’ll hide it from poachers by using his heel to erase turtle tracks in the sand.
Tripod has moved a few feet closer to the shrubs lining the beach and started a new hole. It usually takes turtles 45 minutes to build a nest cavity and deposit eggs before heading back to sea, but tonight the green takes her time, digging four different holes over three hours.
“Missing that back fin makes it real hard for her. But I’ve seen her nest before. She usually gets it done eventually,” says Gideon as he lies on his belly, between walks, chin cupped in his hands. “Isn’t she something? I must have seen this hundreds of times but I never get tired of watching.”
Tripod never did lay her eggs in a nest that night. But female sea turtles have a lot riding on their nesting strategy: Scientists estimate that under normal conditions, only 1 in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings will survive to adulthood. Gideon walks the beach every three days to look for new nests, markers of where to find hatchlings later.
Nature picture credits: Photo © Landon Nordeman
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