The return of South Africa’s sea turtles is a conservation success story
- KwaZulu-Natal’s Sea Turtle programme has seen leatherbacks and loggerheads nesting in greater numbers
- Dunes and beaches of South Africa’s first natural Unesco World Heritage site are an underrated destination
During the eerie calm that settles just after midnight we spot her. A large, dark shape, flecked white by moonlight, lugs itself from the waves, leaving a wake of two-metre-wide tractor-like tracks. She is fully lit fleetingly by the routine swirl of KwaZulu-Natal’s Sodwana Bay lighthouse: a leatherback turtle, the second-largest reptile species in the world.
To find her, it took two hours of scouting the nocturnal shoreline with guide Pete Jacobs, of Ufudu Turtle Tours, in a safari-style 4x4. As we drove along the hard sand left by the high tide, the open sides of the vehicle whipped the ocean breeze into mini gales, the beach below heaving with scuttling ghost crabs. Following a coffee break, Jacobs steered the vehicle south, towards the beaches of Mseni, and that’s where we saw her.
Of the seven species of sea turtle found worldwide, five – the leatherback, loggerhead, green, hawksbill and Olive Ridley – swim through South Africa’s seas. Only the leatherback and loggerhead leave the Indian Ocean here, though; the former being rarer.
Turtles predate the dinosaurs and have crossed the oceans for 100 million years. Watching one lay her eggs is a timeless wonder. By the light of a red torch (white light could chase the turtle back into the sea, with the risk she might lose her eggs), Jacobs gathers us around our quarry as she prepares a nest site.
The turtle swivels in a circle, flattening the sand – quite a feat for a creature her size, more than two metres across and nearly as long. Once satisfied, she starts digging with her back flippers. Her precision and tenderness are striking. Scoop by sandy scoop, she lifts the white gold substrate and flicks it away, taking about 15 minutes to clean out a hollow nest.
Sodwana Bay is part of the 332,000-hectare iSimangaliso Wetland Park, which stretches along South Africa’s Maputaland coast, from the iMfolozi swamps north to the Mozambique border. Rich in titanium, some of the area’s rolling dunes were earmarked for mining, but plans stalled after a public outcry about the potential destruction of such a beautiful feature, and the iSimangaliso Wetland Park was inscribed on Unesco’s World Heritage list in 1999.
Virtually the entire nesting range for both the leatherback and loggerhead lies within the park, South Africa’s first natural World Heritage Site. The wide-open swathes of sand not only provide turtles with prime nesting property, they shape their very destiny. Titanium particles in the sand absorb heat from the sun and dictate the sex of hatchlings: nest temperatures above 29 degrees Celsius result in a female hatchling; below that and a male is born.
It wasn’t until as recently as 1963 that the Natal Parks Board realised turtles nested here. The board initiated the Sea Turtle programme on the Maputaland coast in summer 1963/64 – the research continues today, making it the longest-running turtle study in the world – and from 1970 to 2000, tagged and recorded more than 350,000 hatchlings. The tags were made of titanium, ironically, the metal’s durability and anticorrosive properties making it suitable.
This research helped prove hatchlings spend their first 10 years or so floating in the metre of water below the ocean’s surface, eating whatever comes their way. Then the survivors seek better feeding grounds – rich in jellyfish and other gratifying invertebrates for the leatherback – and return to South Africa’s beaches roughly 20 years later, upon reaching sexual maturity.
Jacobs assures us our presence will not interfere with our leatherback’s ancient instincts. Perfect ping pong ball-shaped eggs emerge – plop, plop, plop – almost 100 dropping to the sand with a soft thud. The mother will return to lay more eggs a few more times this summer.
Various theories, including an acute sense of smell, an internal GPS and the Earth’s magnetic forces, have been put forward to explain the homing instinct, but it is unknown for certain why a breeding turtle returns to the exact stretch of shoreline on which she was born. Thus it is crucial to protect nesting sites.
There are other nesting beaches north of Sodwana Bay, and so we take the old coastal road to Mabibi. On tyres that have been deflated to negotiate the soft sand, we pass tall milkwood, mangosteen and fig trees, the remnants of the Afrotropical woods that once covered this coast and stretched uninterrupted south, all the way to Durban.
After dinner at the chic Thonga Beach Lodge, Bheki Tembe, a Mabibi local and one of the lodge’s three guides, takes me for a “turtle trot”.
“I remember my grandmother telling us we had to be careful of [turtles],” says Tembe, as phosphorescence sparks in the footprints we leave along the shore. “If we got too close, they could grab you with the flipper and drag you to the sea: I grew up thinking it was a dangerous creature.”
The risks leatherbacks face are many, Tembe explains, but prominent among them is the plastic that clogs the oceans, pieces of which often look like jellyfish. Many turtles perish after munching a floating plastic bag. The guide’s grandmother was wrong; the dangerous creature in this relationship is the human.
Tembe spots flashlights above us, in the dunes. “Maybe it is the monitors. They don’t come down to the beach at set regular hours each evening, [the unpredictability designed] to prevent poaching.”
Each nesting season, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife (as the Natal Parks Board is now known) hires two monitors from coastal communities in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Different monitors are chosen each year to keep an eye on nesting sites and gather data, the programme providing much needed training and employment in these remote parts.
Monitors not only record statistics but also help educate locals on the plight of turtles and try to prevent the looting of eggs (much like rhino horn, turtle eggs are believed to have medicinal value). The monitors are one of the reasons the programme has been a success.
“To our intense delight, the numbers of turtles visiting to nest each year have grown dramatically since we started in 1963,” conservationist and former Natal Parks Board chief executive Dr George Hughes, who played a large part in establishing the programme, writes by email. “Roughly speaking, during the early years we recorded around 200 loggerhead females per year and over 50 years that has grown to in excess of 1,000 per year. The trend line has been on a definite up since the programme started.”
The tranquil, tropical Maputaland coast is an underrated destination. During South Africa’s summer, from October to March, the presence of turtles makes it all the more captivating. Looking down at the tiny tracks of hatchlings that have, after a two-month incubation, safely made their way to the sea from Mabibi Beach, I can only hope future generations will be able to enjoy the experience.