She was only 15 as she waited in the warm, tropical eastern Pacific off the once remote beach known as Ostional in a land that, about 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus had named "Costa Rica", the "rich coast." She was an olive ridley sea turtle and she had reached breeding age.
The moon was in its last quarter. The afternoon November rains had given rise to gentle moonlight as she waited expectantly.
As it has done for countless years, the moon was gracing the earth with its seemingly everlasting phases. Though she could not know it, it was drawing her ashore. She was not alone. At first, a few yards away, another Pacific marine turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, and soon hundreds, thousands, now tens of thousands of marine sea turtles.
There is something mysterious about nature. A few months earlier, this marine turtle and the multitude of sea turtles now alongside her were scattered across the Pacific Ocean, some as far away as nearly 3,000 miles.
Though food was plentiful far out in the Pacific, something was stirring inside her. She and many more like her felt the same compulsion to return to Ostional Beach. They had to go back to where they had arrived.
Now, as she waited in the soft moonlight, she was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had swum she had mated with different male turtles in the clear tropical waters because, they, like her, were being affected by something unseen, a primeval force. It was something so compelling that it had been bringing her kind back to Ostional Beach since before the first dinosaur.
This sea turtle was somehow returning to the very beach where had hatched in 1995. No one knows how it finds the exact beach where its life began. Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters long. Now part of Costa Rica's Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is almost certainly the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on the planet. Indeed, the year this turtle hatched, perhaps half a million females had nested in massive "arribadas."
For more than two decades, the mother of this olive ridley joined huge Costa Rica arribadas annually and she would have done so again except that she drowned in an illegal shrimping net just a few weeks before. Thousands more perished by commercial fishermen. Many more died awfully by ingesting plastic bags. Our jetsam and flotsam is their killer and today they are endangered across the planet where they've lived since before there was time.
But, neither our turtle nor the hundreds of thousands now alongside her are aware of this. As they gather, there are now so many that it seems one could almost walk on their backs for a lkilometer or more. They don't realize they were on earth long before the first Tyrannasauras Rex or that when they lay their eggs on this tiny wildlife refuge, men, women, and children will lawfully raid their nests and take 1,000,000 eggs in return for protecting the rest of the clutches and preserving the species.
Then, as quietly as they first appeared, as silently as they gathered, as patiently as they waited, they begin to paddle ashore. One turtle, a second, dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands---even more. They come through the nights and through the days, day after day. This is the Arribada of Costa Rica, a must see for Costa Rica vacations.
Writer Victor Krumm lives in Costa Rica. Go to his popular site
Costa Rica Vacations and check out the spectacular
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