An Evening with Olive Ridley Turtles

It was after a family function gathering, we all cousins decided to head to the beach (quite nearby, around 2kms from my cousins home) and spend some time there. It is the beach which carries a lot of our childhood memories. Like expected it was clean and calm with not many people around. Almost after an hour of water walk and play we all decided to head back home and saw a crowd gathered at the far end. There was something in a red bucket which everyone were peeking at. We got curious and rushed there to find many and lots of baby turtle hatchlings (There were 80+ as we got the count from authorities).

Here is the story!
The turtles come and lay eggs. The forest department authorities after knowing and finding the eggs construct secured boundaries and keep the eggs under the sand with a sign board indicating the date of hatch. When they hatch and come out of the sand, they are all released to water the same day. We got a chance to hold them, take some pictures and see them happily joining the waters.

We also learnt some interesting facts about them:

• Generally one in ten survives when they get into water
• They have a small food sack carried by them which supplies them food for next two days and after that they need to hunt for food.
• They have an excellent built in GPS with them and very accurate with locations they visit in their life time.

Well, it could not have been a better evening! Here is one of the video I captured:

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