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Photo by Barbara Baird
Volunteer Tom Spangrud and Turtle Tsar Mike Reynolds on the beach near Gulf Shores |
The Turtle Tsar
By Barbara Baird
I got up before dawn and headed out to Orange Beach last May to meet the Turtle Tsar, Mike Reynolds. Reynolds pointed to a place in the sand, cordoned off and marked as a sea turtle nest.
“There are 127 eggs in there,” he said. We were looking at the first nest of the season.
From May through October, sea turtles come out of the surf to nest. You can tell it’s a turtle in the sand, because its tracks look like a tractor wheel. Loggerhead turtles make most of the nests, but an occasional Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, the world’s most endangered sea turtle, comes ashore to lay her eggs.
Reynolds and his wife, Prissy, moved to Gulf Shores, Ala., in 2001. That’s when he became interested in saving baby sea turtles from heading in the wrong direction — toward city and condo lights and not back into the sea. At that time, only the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service marked nests. Reynolds became a volunteer to help those efforts and later organized Share the Beach. He now wears a shirt that reads “Turtle Tsar.”
Reynolds said Share the Beach has grown in ranks to at least 300 volunteers. They patrol the beaches, searching for new nests and marking, dating and keeping an eye on them. Some volunteers work late-night nest-sitting duties. Volunteers block artificial lights and dig trenches toward the sea. When the babies hatch, they are attracted to the moonlight and ergo, the right direction.
“Mama sea turtles get disoriented, too, by light,” said Reynolds. “We couldn’t do this without the volunteers. We have 47 miles of Alabama beach. It’s divided into seven sections and each section has a team leader, almost everybody is local. We have a new team leader who is the temporary volunteer coordinator for vacationers who want to be part of the training.”
These vacationers get basic turtle training that includes a walk on the beach.
Last year, an estimated 4,300 hatchlings made it back to the Gulf of Mexico. Overall, the organization estimated it has guided about 17,390 hatchlings from their nests to the water.
Last summer because of the oil spill, all nests had to be relocated. By August, volunteers had relocated 19 nests. Reynolds, along with special teams, packed the nests in specially prepared containers with Alabama beach sand and sent them to Cape Canaveral.
This summer, the turtles will stay home.
WANT MORE? > Visit www.Alabamaseaturtles.com or call (866) SEA-TURTLE.