SURVIVAL INSTINCT
There's an animal that looks like a dinosaur on the beach. Its fat, pointed tail is dug deep into the ground, like an anchor for its huge body, and its large, paddle-like wings slash through the sand. It is a powerful animal, almost as long as a person is tall and several times heavier, judging by its massive armour-plated back, replete with long, parallel ridges. The cuirass feels soft, like tanned leather.
The animal is exhausted. She has just given birth to several dozen offspring. She groans and cries thick greenish tears between attempts to heave herself from the ground and crawl towards the sea. An array of stars shine brightly enough to illuminate her spiky armour as it hits a silver wave. Three more waves and she has vanished.
Staff at global conservation body WWF promised a modern miracle but what I have just encountered looks more like a throwback to pre-history - which turtles are; they've barely changed since the Jurassic era.
Last night, I followed biologist Made Artha Jaya to another stretch of beach. As part of his ongoing research into migration patterns, Jaya caught a few olive turtles and equipped them with radio transmitters. But the animals he was dealing with are very different to the leatherback I've just met; in fact, leatherbacks resemble other sea turtles to the same degree as lions resemble tigers.
Instead of a shell they have thick, leather-like armour and are much bigger than other turtles. The female on the beach was a comparatively small adult: 158cm from head to tail. Her cousins can grow up to 2.5 metres long and weigh as much as a small car.
Predators abound on the beaches where turtles give birth; wild pigs, dogs and monitor lizards dig up poorly hidden nests and devour the eggs. Of those that do hatch, only one out of every 1,000 will live into adulthood. And their worst enemies are human.
Indonesia's Papua province, on the island of New Guinea, is blessed with invaluable natural resources but for decades most of its wealth has bypassed the local population, leaving Papuans some of the poorest citizens in the country. Turtles here have long been a source of food and money, so any talk of protecting the endangered animal meets with a lot of local resistance.