Nature Notes: Surprise Element

This naturalist gets his first experience witnessing the marvel of sea turtles leaving their watery comfort zones to nest on the beaches of Oman

By Richard Hoath

I had seen sea turtles from boats, mahogany heads breaching the waves with little to suggest the bulk below. I had snorkeled with sea turtles. I had dived with sea turtles and been made embarrassed by my reliance on SCUBA while they swung and swept around me. But until this January, I had not witnessed sea turtles nesting, the females dragging themselves from their element to lay their eggs in the sand. This January I got to experience just that and it was visceral and compelling. I was in Oman.

More accurately I was at Ras Al Jinz in Oman, some 50 kilometers east of the town of Sur and perhaps the easternmost outpost of the Arabian peninsular. At Ras Al Jinz, Green Sea Turtles come to lay their eggs. If your image of a sea turtle is that of a tortoise merely hurled into the ocean, then imagine more. Beneath the water sea turtles are all grace, even balletic. While the tortoise bears on its carapace the image of a stolid, slow-moving Trojan, below water the sea turtles, and there are several different species, belie this image. These are no chelonians chucked into the ocean to see how they will fare. Sea turtles may have evolved on land from their land-lubbering ancestors, but beneath the waves they are sheer mastery. The sand-dragging forelimbs are now flippers and the hind limbs deft rudders. These are creatures in their element.

And yet it is not quite their element. In order to reproduce they, more specifically the females, must still come on land in order to lay their eggs just as their ancestors did and just as their land-based relatives, the tortoises, including the endangered Egyptian Tortoise, do to this day. So on selected beaches throughout the world the sea turtles drag themselves out of the sea, haul themselves across the sand and driven by an instinct that is at once compelling and incredibly moving, they lay their eggs. Normally this happens on a few special nights in the year dictated by lunar cycles and thousands of gravid females haul themselves out of the ocean to lay their eggs. But at Ras Al Jinz, for some reason, this mass lay-in is dissipated and the females come in in smaller numbers but every day and throughout the year. And it can be witnessed.

It all happens at night, as the best things do. Ras Al Jinz is now a natural reserve and fully protected by the Omani authorities. You have to book a place on a turtle watch and you must adhere to the policies and procedures of the authorities — no disturbance, no touching, no lights and no flash photography. The latter was interesting. Our ranger took us to see one of the females in the act of laying her eggs. We were taken at the end of the process as our female was laying the last of her dozens of eggs, glistening orbs of promise of which only two or three will hatch, grow and survive to adulthood. The eggs were being dropped one by one into a pit of her own excavation and our small group gathered round to witness this most intimate of moments.

She, the ranger told us, would have been in these waters for up to three years prior to her dragging herself ashore and laying her eggs, the new generation. And we, a group of some eight, were there to witness it. And as we did the tablets and smart phones and mobile phones all went up to capture the moment. Except they did not. No flash photography is allowed at Ras Al Jinz as the flash disorientates and disturbs the nesting females. They find their way to the beaches using light, moonlight. And the newly hatched youngsters that we also saw, find their way to the sea in the same way. To flash would be to befuddle and it is not allowed and unlike in many countries — one springs to mind — in Oman this was strictly enforced. Except for me. Bereft of flash and with no desire to disturb the laying female I opened my sketchbook and sketched. No rules against that.

And so I watched and sketched as she deposited her eggs. It was, curiously, immensely moving. She was completely helpless on land. For all her balletic athleticism beneath the water for this one task, driven by primal urge and instinct, she was, for her meter and a half of awesome carapace, utterly helpless. We watched as she laid her eggs. In so many other places others plunder and harvest the eggs and sea turtles the world over are now in deep trouble, most, including the Green Sea Turtle, endangered.

Amazingly it got even better. The next day I traveled north to Wadi Shab, a renowned desert wadi that meets the coast just north of the village of Tiwi, a village which boasts a beautiful wadi of its own. Wadi Shab is celebrated for its water, water that flows from the prodigious mountain hinterland and meets the Arabian Gulf in a series of lush and lushly vegetated ponds and lakes. In a land bereft of ponds and lakes, ponds and lakes attract visitors like bees round a honey pot and while I do not want to deny the Omanis their weekend out, I had not traveled thousands of miles to explore a supposedly remote desert wadi in a plastic pedalo accompanied by a zillion other plastic pedalos each bulging with children in varying stages of pre-teen and with voices and music to match. This was not conducive for natural history.

It was not conducive for Hume’s Wheatear. Hume’s Wheatear was top of my bird wish list for Oman. It is a substantial wheatear, some 17 centimeter long and glossy black above and gleaming white below, slender billed and, according to the literature “bull-headed”. If I could not find it in Oman, where it is reputedly fairly common in the mountains, then I would have to go to Iraq, which is not going to happen soon, or Iran. Oman was going to be my best shot but an Omani wadi packed with lurid blue and scarlet plastic canoes over-spilling with raucous adolescents was not going to work. How could I listen out for its call, a “short lyrical jumble,” when the wadi walls were resounding with Rihanna and bouncing with Beyonce. It would drive me Gaga.

I retreated, with no offence to the two divas, and trekked north and then across the main coastal road to an area of unprepossessing and barren hillside, hillside bereft of vegetation save for a few stoic but stunted acacias. This was anything but unprepossessing to a Hume’s Wheatear for whom “mountain slopes and …boulder strewn barren hills with scant vegetation” are bread and butter. I strode up those barren slopes and almost immediately began to hear song. Not Rihanna or Beyonce but pleasant song, birdsong. A small, drab ball of feathers flew from beneath my feet, again not Rihanna, but it disturbed something else. A larger very black and white bird with a distinctive black and white tail erupted from the boulders. It had the courtesy to perch on wires slung between incongruous pylons. It was my Hume’s Wheatear. It had the even greater courtesy to fly not away but back to flaunt itself atop one of the acacias. It was definitely my Hume’s Wheatear.

I saw it once more and given its range probably never again. I also saw Red-tailed Wheatears which I might possibly catch up with here at the pyramids at Giza where it has occasionally been recorded. I saw Desert Wheatear, at Sur and Northern Wheatear at Wadi Tiwi. Back in Egypt I won’t get Hume’s but there will be White-crowned Black Wheatear in Wadi Degla and elsewhere and the similar but larger and slimmer Hooded Wheatear. As for the sea turtles I might see them too. But sadly finding their tracks on breeding beaches in North Sinai and especially Zaranik west of El-Arish might be a dream too far at the moment.