Dispatches
Central America Expedition 2010: Day 4 – Leatherback Trust, Costa Rica
March 8, 2010
If there’s one thing you’ve got to be prepared for as a member of a Green Living Project expedition, it’s early mornings. Day 5 was no exception, as we left our overnight hotel in San Jose shortly after 5 a.m. to catch our Nature Air flight to Tamarindo, on the Pacific coast in Guanacaste. Nature Air, a Costa Rican airline that was one of three winners of National Geographic’s 2009 Geotourism Challenge award, is kindly providing all our domestic flights within Costa Rica (and even to Panama) and waiving all surcharges for excess baggage – a good thing, given the amount of gear we are lugging!
Our small 19-seater plane whisked us to Tamarindo in a little over an hour, including a stop in Liberia, northwestern Costa Rica’s transportation hub. With the door to the cockpit open, Ryan and John had a great time filming the pilots at work. We were the only passengers to disembark at the basic little airstrip in Tamarindo, where we were met by Dr. Jim Spotila, co-founder of Leatherback Trust, which works to protect the leatherback turtles nesting on the beaches around Playa Grande, across the estuary from Tamarindo.
Leatherbacks are the world’s largest sea turtles and are truly prehistoric creatures – according to the Moon Guide to Costa Rica, leatherback fossils dating back 100 million years have been found. Adult leatherbacks are typically up to six feet in length and weigh up to 1,500 pounds. The turtles migrate across great distances and come ashore for short periods of time between October and February to lay their eggs above the high-water mark on Playa Grande and adjacent beaches.
Jim, a professor of environmental science at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, has been involved with turtle conservation in Costa Rica for decades and has a wealth of information to share about leatherbacks and about the challenges of creating and supporting a national park on Costa Rica’s increasingly popular northwest coast. He and Leatherback Trust co-founder Dr. Frank Paladino of Indiana Purdue University were instrumental in the establishment of Las Baulas Marine National Park, which protects several of the turtles’ nesting beaches. Unfortunately the park is threatened by development – we saw countless Century 21 signs advertising land within the restricted margin of the beach – and proposed legal reduction in size. Leatherback Trust is working to combat both threats and to improve the survival rate of hatchlings through nest monitoring and other activities.
