A gentle breeze blows as we follow the beach in the middle of the night – bare toes treading on the cold, damp sand and our eyes straining for shadows at the water’s edge. The starry sky of the Milky Way is so far away from the bright lights of the city, but the sea remains pitch black. Soon, I’m sure, there will be loggerhead turtles, using the window that opens two hours on either side of high tide to shorten their slow, silent log on the beach for nesting.
At the Turtle Park on Bare Island, about 650 middle-aged beauties return each winter to lay their eggs. These are Australian sea turtles – the only species endemic to our shores – but what we know about the flats depends on the growing number of studies conducted by scientists and sleepless volunteers on this coast.
There is a love story about the God of the West Wind who calms the sea and softens the wind enough to allow the legendary kingfisher lovers Alcyone and Seix to lay sticky eggs in their floating nest. Over the centuries, this quiet period has been known as the winter solstice, and we witness its calming effect as the plains look like the clock faces that keep the AusTurtle research team moving.
Red lights piercing the midnight darkness, I lend a hand as the team records egg temperatures, measures carapaces, and notes leaves—all adding to a pool of knowledge that will one day transform the mysterious status of the flat preserve from a “data gap” into something real.
A pop-up research camp on Bare Rock Island in Kenbi’s traditional land is a casual and unassuming place, but it can’t help smooth survival for the turtle-loving volunteers who give up a week’s sleep.
This uninhabited island is far enough from Darwin that it is a beautiful reef and sand island off Joseph Bonaparte Bay. A three-legged saltwater crocodile nicknamed Graham ensures that swimming in the endlessly blue sea is impossible, but catching queens is simply thrilling, and the sunsets, starry night skies and wildlife encounters are surreal.
A swimmer who is depressed
Not much is known about the flatback turtle, Natator depressus, named for its characteristic horizontal shell. Scientists put the survival rate at one in 1,000, but no one knows how close to extinction it is, with both the Northern Territory government and the IUCN Red List calling the turtle’s conservation status a “data gap”.
How plaices spend 30 years between hatching and returning to nest on the same Australian coast is still a mystery. But it’s Darwin’s OsTurtle volunteer group that’s working to discover it, and more than three decades of research on Bare Reef Island aims to give the turtles a fighting chance against the onslaught of global warming.
I meet my first crush at 2 a.m. as the tide moves in on the beach. As the first clusters of turtles emerge, using a “safety in numbers” approach against predators, landing with incredible timing, the four-hour nesting window fades.
The night passes in a quiet rush. As each turtle comes ashore, the team time their track and write numbers in the sand to form a sort of ‘turtle queue’, before leaving each giant 90kg board to slowly climb the dunes.
On this night, 18 ospreys nest on the beach with an unpleasant but undeniable decision. Over the course of a few hours, the turtle may clean one or more nesting sites until she finds the right one. Then she patiently digs out a deep egg chamber with a slow, deft spade of her hind paws, eventually laying a clutch of 50 white eggs—the largest of sea turtles.
Just as nesting begins, researchers quietly enter to measure each turtle’s cage and record nest temperatures, read identification tags and tags for newcomers, before removing all turtles and leaving the turtle alone.
Researchers to the rescue
As the turtles return to the sea and the sun rises, the team and I make one last round of the island to find nests that were previously laid overnight. When turtles hatch, not all 50 hatchlings make it to the surface before the nest collapses. AusTurtle explorers quickly become lifesavers, collecting the tiny critters under the sand to escape under the safety of darkness at the next high tide.
I quickly decided that this was my favorite morning trip – six kids saved and my daughter Maya, whose all-night shift made her one of the crew, has the right to be named. We head back to bed and after a much needed nap gather for mugs of coffee at the AusTurtle pop-up camp.
This spartan collection of warm, earthy tents and tarps is a world away from glamping, as it’s zero-impact (even composting toilet waste bricks are removed). No fires are allowed on the ground, no ground pegs from the tents and no water for washing. Sand sleeping bags are very hypocritical, and since it’s all-volunteer, everyone pitches in – scientists and marine biology students, gray nomads, locals and young turtle-riding enthusiasts too.
Surveys last a week and are booked half a year in advance, and the reason people queue up to bid their time is due to the magic of these mysterious turtles and the stunning beauty of the island.
Bald Sand Island, surrounded by white sand and almost devoid of vegetation, is a beautiful island with high cliffs that form its southeastern edge. The reef extends south towards the neighboring island of Grose and the fishing is great downstream.
Darwin tourists come to camp and fish for queenfish, and after they leave, Graham the crocodile continues his patrol on the sand, recovering from his hunting trips to admire the seabirds and turtles on the reef.
Land of the Kenbi tribe
There are no permanent water wells on the bare sand island, but the Kenbi women, who consider the island sacred, believe that seasonal pools from the summer monsoon rains are connected to an equally revered water well on the mainland. Today’s visitors are therefore not allowed to walk the beach, but scattered shells indicate a less respectable period when the island was used as a military firing range.
After the longest Aboriginal land claim in Australian history, native title to Bare Sands Island was finally awarded to the Canby tribe in 2016. They call the island Ngulbitjik and visit regularly in the winter to dig turtle nests for eggs, which they prefer to eat mostly raw.
I meet elders who arrive from Darwin with a boatload of Canby children and their non-wax mates. Here to plant their feet on their island, the children join in when the elders dig one of the nests of the previous night and throw out the eggs.
Watching on, bewildered and conflicted, it’s an incongruous end to a long night of joy, marveling at the determination of these turtles to safely beach their eggs, but veteran researcher Andrew Raith suggests I look at the bigger picture.
Andrew Raith, with a two-decade-long involvement in OsTurtle Island and Bare Sand, believes that a flat survival rate of 1,000 does not significantly affect the hunting of indigenous people. “These people have been living and using these resources for thousands of years, and these sea turtles are still here. So that’s proof that they’re not doing anything to affect this population,” he says. “Collecting a few turtle nests on this island provides value to those people who don’t overharvest, because it’s not in their best interest to deny future generations access to their eggs and protein.”
Later, as my eight-year-old daughter releases a handful of rescued hatchlings into the ruined nest, I watch them scurry toward the sun along the wet sand and think how precious 43 grams of turtle is.
Sea turtles have evolved to produce large numbers of offspring and are gambling that most of them will be lost. But they now face problems far more important than hunters and predators.
The future of flats
After a sleepless week of turtle tracking, you might expect the research team to be a little overwhelmed. Instead, we get a sweet invitation to join them for dinner—as long as we bring the fish.
On our last night together, after we’ve had a delicious princess curry, the turtles come slowly. At 2 o’clock in the morning, the first groups of girls appear and the night work begins.
Recorded data shows that a pair of turtles often come ashore together, beaching year after year, as these turtles communicate in the sea. Scientists believe this indicates a significant evolutionary change, but only time will tell if the flats can adapt quickly enough to deal with the challenges of global warming.
So far, their future looks grim. Scientists predict that rising sea levels will drown turtle nests, and rising global temperatures will also raise the temperature of the nests. Females will hatch in warmer nests, and with fewer males available to mate, the turtle population will become unviable.
Flatback turtles nest in northern Australia from Broome to Brisbane, but Northern Territory turtles are in a very vulnerable state. They cannot escape the heat to migrate south to nest on cooler coasts because the NT plains are completely over their territory.
I ask scientist Wright what will happen if we lose the plains. “Sea turtles are an indicator species,” he replies. “So if the flats go, you weaken the whole ecosystem, and not only are the turtles gone, but the invertebrates, the corals, the algae that the sea turtles and their predators are harvesting.”
In short, the entire ecosystem will collapse. “And that’s a more important issue to me than how many nests are being used as a food source,” Wright says. “Humans are part of this ecosystem. We often think we’re apart of it, but we really aren’t.”
Make it happen
When to go: Smooth nesters nest on Bare Sand Island from May to September.
Join the Research Camp: Bare Sands OsTurtle Island volunteer camps run from June to July each year. A week’s accommodation costs $800 per person and includes boat transfers from Darwin, all meals and tent accommodation (austurtle.org).
Join the journey: Darwin Sea Turtle Watching Tours depart Darwin at 4:00pm and arrive on the island in 90 minutes for a guided turtle encounter and dinner under the stars before returning around midnight (seadarwin.com).
