Trinidad Day 5

Tonight we went to Grande Rivière, the beach where Margaret nested. It is a two-hour drive up the winding Toco Main Road from Matura. It took us a little longer on the way there. We were running low on diesel for Scott’s truck. They had run out of fuel at the gas station up at Toco, so we had to start our trip by going in the opposite direction—half an hour down to Valencia and then back again.

We were excited to go and meet the team that found Margaret and to see Margaret’s beach. “The turtles love Grande Rivière!” one of the beach monitoring team called out to me. Indeed. Sometimes there are a hundred leatherbacks at a time. A hundred at a time.

The beach is only about a kilometre long. This means the density of animals is incredible—turtles nesting on top of each other’s nests, digging up each other’s eggs—turtles trying to climb over each other—turtles everywhere. There are resorts and homes that are close to the beach at Grande Rivière, too. I watched one leatherback crawl under a child’s swing and into someone’s backyard to nest!

But the most incredible thing we saw was this:

Look carefully just to the right of the turtle’s flipper. You can see the bottom of the sword. Then follow straight up to see where the shaft comes out. There are barnacles clinging to the top, which can make it hard to find in the photograph at first.

It is a leatherback nesting with the sword from a billfish slammed straight through its body.

It would have been something to see—the fish—likely a swordfish or marlin—slashing its sword through the water to stun the smaller prey fish around it, then somehow, mistakenly, driving that sword (with clearly incredible force) through the leatherback. And then the fish becoming stuck in the turtle. So stuck that its sword broke off.

Wow.

And the leatherback turtle survived. (The fish likely did not.) Not only did she survive, but here she was, nesting.

“We’re going to take that right out,” said Scott cheerfully, as Devan, Mike and I stood, shocked, by the turtle. “I’ve seen this once before.” Scott promptly dug his Leatherman tool from his backpack, clamped onto the sword, and heaved upward. The sword came out. There was almost no blood—just a nasty smell. The leatherback’s body had encased the sword in a kind of sleeve. Sealed it off. We could look deep into the tunnel it left behind.

“That should close right up,” said Scott. “I’m going to bleach this. We’ll send it out to some billfish folks and figure out what kind of sword it is.”

This is Scott holding the sword just after he’s taken it out.

The sword rattled around in the back of the truck on the way home. (It was way too stinky to have in the cab with us. As we made the sharp turns back down the road, it nudged up along Devan’s backpack in the truck bed. He had to wash his bag three times to get the smell out.)

This is a photograph of Nivon, one of the Nature Seekers, sitting out front at Suzan’s Guest House back in Matura. Scott had the sword soaking in a bleach solution all day. Nivon held the cleaned sword and turned it over and over in his hands while Scott told him the story. “These leatherbacks are amazing creatures,” he said—first in wonder—and then in triumph. “Amazing creatures!”