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The Founding Father: Otto Tranberg
—By Rebecca Clarren
When former National Fish and Wildlife ranger Otto Tranberg was growing up on St. Croix in the 1920s, no one worried about the extinction of a creature as commonplace as the island’s dirt roads. Everyone ate sea turtles. More than chicken. More than beef.
“On Fridays the men would go around town taking orders, did people want steak, chicken or stew? Those were the kinds of turtle meat. Then they would take the turtles and wire the fins together, place them on their backs and then put a wet bag on their belly so they’d stay fresh until the slaughter on Saturdays,” says Tranberg, 90, his eyes squinting behind his dark-rimmed glasses at the far-gone memory. As he sits on the cement slab of his back porch, awash in the light of late afternoon, his strong voice and quick laughter belie his years. “We weren’t knowing about conservation then, about the impact that these harvests would have on the species.”
Yet by the time Tranberg returned to St. Croix in 1973, after a stint in the Navy during World War II and life on the mainland with his war-bride Emily, the island was a different place: The roads were paved, the kids didn’t swim naked in the sea anymore and there were far fewer sea turtles crawling up on the beaches during nesting season.
The passage of the Endangered Species Act the year before made it illegal to kill sea turtles in the United States, including the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, codified in 1973, also gave sea turtles better protection.
Even so, poaching was common. Tranberg heard some friends talking about a local who had cut all four flippers off a leatherback turtle—a species that commonly reaches 1,000 pounds—and left it to die on the hot sand. The news enraged him. Strapping on a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver he had kept from before the war, he took to patrolling Sandy Point beach, a popular nesting ground for both green and leatherback turtles, every single night for months during nesting season.
“I was the foreman, and my wife and my daughter and my neighbors were the workers,” says Tranberg of his vigilante crew, grinning broadly.
One gun-toting volunteer garnered huge results. Tranberg’s efforts caught the attention of the nascent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which started an official sea-turtle watch program the following year. The agency hired Tranberg as a ranger. After lobbying by Tranberg and other turtle researchers, the federal government eventually declared the beach a refuge for sea turtles in 1984.
Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge is now the largest leatherback turtle-nesting beach in the United States and hosts one of the longest-running sea turtle research programs in the Caribbean.
Nature picture credits: Photo © Landon Nordeman
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