The Hindu Business Line : Warm welcome to fresh recruits

On a Sunday morning, over 200 young men and women, with little fuss and less sound flagged off around 38 hatchlings of Olive Ridley turtles into the blue waters of the Arabian Sea.

The Arabian Sea accepted the fresh recruits by taking them away with every wave. One followed an inch-long turtle on its journey to the Arabian Sea. It crawled over the sands with its front flippers and hind legs, resting often to catch its breath and one picked it up and eased it into a tiny wave.

An enchanting and little understood spectacle has started. The moments were clicked by more than a 100 digital cameras. The little ones will have none to report to, none to help. They will be alone all their lives.

For the next 10-15 years, nobody knows what happens to the Olive Ridleys with one in every 1,000 hatchlings turning into an adult, said Varad Giri, the herpetologist from the Bombay Natural History Society.

The male Olive Ridley never touches land, while the female comes over to the same spot from which it was released to lay eggs, added my friend Giri.

On Sunday, Kedar Bhide, Parthiv Sanghvi, Varad Giri and this writer were part of the crowd celebrating the Turtle Festival at Velas (Ratnagiri district, Maharashtra) put in place by the Sahyadri Nisarga Mitra. Most, including the few old men and women, came from Pune and Mumbai and one saw an ST bus carting enthusiasts from Mumbai to Velas.

A female Olive Ridley lays a minimum of 100 eggs and a maximum of 200 eggs into sand pits with a depth of about two ft and goes away; after about 50 days of incubation, the hatchlings (about 80 per cent of the eggs hatch) crawl up to the surface and are on the road to the Arabian Sea. The Turtle Festival celebrates the moment.

A day earlier, on Saturday, we walked the beach and met up with Gopinath Ganpath Mahadik, a 60-year-old farmer, who has been protecting for years the lone nursery on the beaches of Velas.

He roams the beach collecting eggs, places them in sand holes in the nursery and looks after them till the final act from about December to May every year.

He is a farmer and lives in Velas and has been helping Vishwas Dattatray (Bhau) Katdare, the man protecting and conserving Olive Ridley turtles.

In 2005, one met Katdare and never thought Olive Ridley conservation on the western coast of Maharashtra will become an important utsav. But it has over a period of eight years.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has given a grant of Rs 14 lakh to SNM for conservation of Olive Ridleys over two years in the villages of Velas, Kelshi, Anjarle, Kolthare and Dabhol, said a happy Bhau Katdare.

In 2002, Sahyadri Nisarga Mitra started marine turtle conservation at Velas, a tiny village on the northernmost tip of Ratnagiri district; incidentally, it is also the highest nesting spot on the entire coast of Maharashtra.

Starting with one village, 50 nests and 2,734 hatchling releases in 2002-03, the activity has spread to 30 villages, 105 nests and 1,890 (January 2008) chick releases in 2007-08.

On Sunday, school children walked in ranks to the beach while the local community is slowly getting used to Bhau and his activity. From eating the eggs or killing the adults to conserving sea turtles makes for an uneasy transition, but men like Gopinath Ganpath Mahadik and Nandkishor Krishnaji Patil, ex-sarpanch of Velas village, are doing their best.

This writer is reasonably sure more villagers will lend their support as the Turtle Festival becomes a business proposition.

The visitors were housed by the villagers at their homes with food and bed provided at a reasonable price; on the beach one saw village women preparing food (kanta pohe, vada pav, samosa, ladoo and tea) for sale and the visitors paid without complaining. We stayed in a 80-year-old tiled roof house (at the foot of a rock) with wooden rafters and floors wiped clean with cow dung; lights blinked as the area suffers a five-hour power cut which could go up in the summer months.

Konkan villages are tightly packed with bamboo partitions marking one home from another; one ST bus fills a village road; the jackfruit trees were in fruit and green curtains of supari, banana, mango, banyan and peepal trees shielded homes and heads from a hot, prickly sun. Sleeping on mats spread on the veranda floor one woke up to the calls of birds specially the kak-kak-kak of the white-bellied sea eagle.

Varad and this writer went for long beach walks and on a hilly elevation, we sighted a full mature, white-bellied sea eagle positioned on a bare tree.

If one is on an outing with Varad, one is sure to spot micro-organisms like the red and black Hitler bug inside a mangrove and the ghost crab scuttling on the beaches with the visit of every wave; from nowhere, he came up with a tiny deep brown frog, picked up from a small pool, in his hand.

There were short breaks for snacks on the nearly six-hour car run from Mumbai to Velas with Kedar Bhide at the wheels.

At one eatery overlooking a valley, we spotted a purple-rumped sunbird hopping around some 15 honeycombs with a few drongos and rose-ringed parakeets for company. Seeing a gecko in gecko country is a must for Varad, while one stood amused at his admiration for a well-designed cockroach on the trunk of a tree. “See, even a cockroach in Konkan is delightful,” he remarked.

Most bare, brown trees were touched up with a dash of green; the brilliant deep-red flame of the forest, silk cotton and coral trees sparkled in mid-air; the primal signatures of spring were scribbled everywhere.

P. Devarajan

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