On an early January night after sunset, I’m walking with Elke Talma toward Settlement Beach, a 1.2-mile stretch of white sand on Aldabra atoll in the western Indian Ocean. We’re each here for a month on different projects: Talma is volunteering with the atoll’s marine research program, and I’m here to study its 180,000 giant tortoises for a book. As Talma leads us out along a path that parallels the beach, we detour around one of these sleeping giants, with its head flopped down on the short, cropped grass.
Aldabra, 400 miles off the eastern coast of Africa, is one of the very few places on Earth where giant tortoises might cross paths with their distant seafaring cousins, green sea turtles, which are the target of our search tonight. Green turtles nest on Aldabra year-round, but fewer are found this time of year. Our red-beam flashlights—the only artificial light out here—sweep the smooth sand, pale in moonlight.
The females, nesting mostly on the atoll’s outer rim, leave distinctive tracks: alternating left-right gouges in the sand up the beach, made by one flipper at a time, that look like tire tread marks from a monster truck. A single line of tracks leads up from the water, and Talma follows them into a stand of casuarina trees above the high-tide mark, where the dry sand is suitable for nesting. The green turtles have dug craters everywhere for their nests.
From above, the beach would look like it’s been bombed. We hear the turtle before we see her. She makes soft scraping sounds as she moves across the dry sand in search of a good spot for her own nest.
The turtle, as clumsy on land as she is elegant in the water, tosses some sand with her flippers, then lets out a low sigh. She moves farther into the trees, seemingly indecisive. The sight of a nesting sea turtle on Aldabra is far more common now than it was 50 years ago.
Here and around the world, green turtles were a valuable source of meat and leather, and their eggs were considered a delicacy. During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, large numbers of green turtles were slaughtered across the islands in the western Indian Ocean. On Aldabra, hunters ambushed females coming up to nest, chopping their heads off.
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