This Little turtle

This post will come with a bit of a disclaimer: I don’t normally intervene in wildlife-related situations that I come across unless I know there are professional people around that are trained in how to rescue/rehabilitate that particular type of animal. It is too easy to make mistakes, or have a negative effect, if we aren’t trained to help that specific animal.

I will just start by saying that, here in Ayampe there is no actual turtle rescue facility, so…

When I found this tiny baby sea turtle on the beach on my mid-day walk, I was pretty sure it was dead, as it was laying in the direct sunlight about forty yards from any water. The tide was low and coming in, which led me to believe that the poor little guy had been out there for quite a while.

He definitely wasn’t looking good…

He wasn’t moving, so I picked him up to have a look and see if he was really as dead as he appeared.

He was not!

As soon as I picked him up he opened his eyes and started moving, able to move his flippers and his head. I took him straight down to the water’s edge, set him down, and he slowly made his way out into the waves rolling up the beach….

and washed straight back up the sand.

I let him try again on his own, but he was moving slowly and seemed to lack the energy to get out through the strong incoming tide and waves on the long, flat beach.

I will say here that I looked around a bit and wasn’t able to find any recent nesting activity on this beach, and haven’t seen any here in the last month and a half. I am not sure that this was his original nesting spot. It seemed to me that the beach was too flat and long for him to get under the waves. He would just get tossed and tumbled by the shallow waves, getting thrashed back up through the small cobblestones and end up on dry land again. I let him try a few times, but he was noticeably slowing down after each effort.

The high tide was in an hour or so, so I decided to try to get the little guy some rest and see if I could get him some water to drink before we tried again on the outgoing tide.

He was looking pretty dehydrated and floppy again after all of his efforts.

I took him home, and let him cool off, and Tam looked up what to do…

After tam did some research on how to help him out, we were able to spoon feed him some sugar water and get him hydrated and cooled off a bit. He really improved after an hour of rest and rehabilitation.

Again, I don’t profess to know what to do in this case, but, with a lack of any professional help around Ayampe, we had to wing it. He would most certainly have died there if we didn’t do anything.

He did perk up a bunch, and he seemed ready to go for another try at the beach…

I made a video of the whole thing, so, if you want to see the rest of the story, here it is:

As you can see, we got him safely underway.

I really tried to let him do the majority of the work getting out there because it is important for him to imprint on the location and to build up his little swimming muscles and coordination. In the end I couldn’t watch him struggle any more, and I felt like he had done all the imprinting and training he could, so I stepped in to help. After I took him out to deeper water, we hung out on the beach for another hour or so, and never saw him wash back in again.

I like to think that he is out there swimming along, eating his sea sponges and jellyfish, happy as can be, the memory of his abduction by tall, pale aliens a distant memory.