Every expedition begins well before the official start and ends far
after its conclusion. This is especially the case with The Black Turtle
Project, an unfolding and evolving effort to join conservation
photography, communication and biology. I can assure you that this
project began long ago and will live on into the future. The past two
weeks in Baja are just the start of a collaborative effort that will
transpire over the coming year and document the nascent and emerging
success story of the black sea turtle's return to the Pacific coast of
the Americas.
For myself, the expedition links back to graduate school and a
decision to -- against the odds, against my advisors' wishes and with no
funding to speak of -- focus several decades of my life on sea turtle
research and conservation. For conservation photographer and Associate Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers, Neil Ever Osborne,
this project also extends back into his past and includes his decision
to pick up a camera and set aside a career as a biologist. For our
colleagues in Mexico, from Michoacan to Baja California, this project
represents decades of committed conservation efforts, dedication in the
face of despair, thousands of all-nighters and -- most-recently -- some
signs of hope. The story of the black turtle is about people: poachers,
children, scientists, artists, fishers, politicians, teachers,
conservationists, photographers, narco-traffickers, guides, leaders and
followers, musicians. What I've come to realize is that all of the
people in this story wear several of those hats, simultaneously or
sequentially.
In the late 1990's the location in Baja that we are visiting now was
one of our research sites. We caught black turtles here, tagged them,
measured and weighed them and then released them back into the bay. We
learned that young turtles caught here would return to the same spot,
even if released in another part of the bay. But eventually poachers
wiped out all of the sea turtles at our site, making our research
impossible. So we moved our efforts to a different part of the bay.
Alejandro Osuna was one of those sea turtle hunters. With his father
he caught and cooked sea turtles right where we are camped now, in the
mangrove-lined Estero Los Cuervos, a branch of Bahia Magdalena. Now
Alejandro is our captain and guide, one of the local leaders working to
bring back the turtles. When we arrived to our former site to set our
research nets we weren't sure what we might find. Had the turtles come
back, just like many other locations along the Baja coast or was the
area still recovering. The plan was to set out our nets for 24 hours to
find out if Estero Los Cuervos could be a viable monitoring site, as it
was so many years ago. Our answer came more quickly than expected, but
not using the techniques we anticipated. At our site we found that a net
was already there. It was an illegal net belonging to poachers who had
set it for turtles. Alejandro wasn't pleased.Read more @HuffingtonPost.com
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