by Hal Herzog
I had watched them work their way through a dozen oysters when I heard Mary Jean say to her new friend, “Oh, you need to talk to my husband—he studies people who love animals.” Judy, it turns out, was nuts over loggerhead turtles—the giant reptiles that nest on beaches from Texas to North Carolina. Mary Jean and I switched seats.
Judy told me she had moved to Edisto ten years ago from Wyoming after her marriage broke up. She worked two jobs for a couple of years and saved enough money to open her hair salon. I asked her about sea turtles, and she lit up, whipped out her cell phone, and started showing me pictures of turtle tracks on the beach, opened nest cavities, and newly hatched button-cute babies. Judy is part of a team of volunteers that patrols the beach at dawn, recording crawls (the three-foot-wide trails in the sand that nesting females leave on the beach) and nest locations, and moving vulnerable nests to safer ground. Once the eggs begin to hatch in a couple of months, she returns and records their fate—the numbers of successfully hatched eggs and dead babies.
Judy invited me to join her the next day on the dawn patrol but we were leaving town. I promised to come back.
A year later, I am sitting in Judy’s living room drinking sweet tea. It is dark and cool, which is good because it is nearly 100 degrees outside with 98% humidity. She introduces me to her arthritic chocolate Lab (named OB because he only has One Ball) and to Megan, her eighteen-year-old granddaughter who also helps with the turtle rescue project. They fill me in on the basics of loggerhead reproductive biology. Female turtles spend their entire lives roaming the oceans, only coming on land every two or three years to lay their eggs. (The males never come ashore.) The nests are architectural marvels. They are shaped like two-foot-deep chemistry flasks with the egg cavity mushrooming out of the bottom of a narrow tunnel. The female excavates the nest with her rear flippers. Once the eggs are deposited, she refills the nest hole and obscures its location from predators.
Many eggs never hatch. A raccoon will dig up the nest or a ghost crab will hide out in the egg cavity, gorging itself on yolks and embryos. In about fifty days, the nestlings will pip their shells, spend a couple of days resting in the nest cavity and absorbing egg yolk, and then start digging their way to the surface. They almost always emerge at night, and instinctively know to make their way toward the surf, drawn by the open sky over the ocean and the reflection of moonlight on the water.
Loggerheads are endangered. Even under the best of circumstances, only one-tenth of one percent of the hatchlings will reach reproductive age and return back to these beaches to continue the cycle. Everything eats baby turtles. But sea turtles are not endangered because of raccoons or ghost crabs or sharks or birds. No, they may go the way of the passenger pigeon because they swallow plastic shopping bags they mistake for jellyfish, or get caught in commercial fishing nets or are poisoned by toxic chemicals or oil spills. There is also the loss of nesting habitat because of beachfront development. At Edisto, light pollution is a big problem. Instead of heading toward the surf, hatchlings are drawn inland by the lights from condos rented by insomniacs or from the gas station just across the road from the beach.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources is in charge of the sea turtle protection program, but it is really made possible by 800 volunteers like Judy who monitor virtually every mile of turtle beach in the state during the breeding season. The program has several purposes. One is scientific: The data gathered by the volunteers is invaluable. Thanks to the efforts of the beach patrollers, biologists know the exact location of nearly every sea turtle nest in South Carolina. They can tell you for any given stretch of beach, the number of crawls, the number of nests, how many eggs were laid, the proportion of dead and live hatchings, and the sources of their mortality. In 2009, for example, 2,184 nests were located on South Carolina beaches, 163,334 eggs hatched, and 10,503 were destroyed. The incubation time of the eggs averaged 54 days, and the average clutch size was 116 eggs.
The second purpose of the sea turtle protection program is to increase the percentage of hatchlings that survive. Volunteers are trained and certified. When they find a nest that is too close to the water line or not buried deep enough, they are authorized to relocate it to safer ground. Very carefully, a handful of sand at a time, they dig into the nest cavity. Then, keeping each egg up-side up, they put it in a bucket, dig the new nest in a better location, and place the eggs in the new nest in the exact order in which they were extracted. On beaches where nests are prone to predation, volunteers will stake a protective fence over nests. Once the eggs have hatched, the volunteers collect additional data by digging open every fourth nest. They record the number of hatched and unhatched eggs and the number that hatched but died in the nest. In the dog days of August, this is hot, dirty, smelly, yolky work. One day, Judy dug open a nest and found twenty dead hatchlings. It was a heartbreaker.
But every now and then, at the bottom of a nest, she will come across a baby turtle that is still alive but who, for some reason, could not make it to the surface on its own.
And she saves it.
Judy has been a volunteer in South Carolina’s sea turtle nest protection program for five years. I ask her why she does it.
“Well, at first it was the thrill of riding a four-wheeler down the beach at dawn. It was exciting coming on those big turtle tracks—the crawls. But the first time you dig up a hatched-out nest to count the eggs and you see one of those little babies alive that did not make it to the surface, it just melts your heart.”
“How many turtles do you think you have saved over the last five years?”
“Oh, lots, maybe hundreds.” Wistfully, she adds, “But I know that, realistically, only one in a thousand will survive.”
Then she laughs. “But, in my mind, every baby turtle that I ever helped makes it. I don’t know what happens to the rest of them. But I know mine make it.”
Then we make plans for the dawn patrol the next morning. Judy tells me to bring water and bug spray.
Six AM. Blue-and-gold Maxwell Parrish sky. The team consists of Judy, myself, a woman named Sherri Johnson, and April Fludd, a seventh-grader who has been working on the sea turtle project for two summers now. Our section of beach is on Botany Bay Plantation—6,500 acres of beach, salt marsh, and old fields and live oak forests. It is one of the most pristine beaches on the Atlantic Coast, a jewel.
We pick up a couple of ATVs loaded with gear: several five-foot-long T-shaped probes used to locate the nests, marker flags, a couple of rolled-up mesh cages to keep the raccoons out, a GPS, a big bucket in case we have to relocate a nest, bright orange signs to warn beachgoers against messing with a turtle nest. Judy tells me to hop on the back of the green four-wheeler with her, and April gets on the red one with Sherri. Zoom—we are off. The sun is coming up over the marsh. The air has a little chill, and we only hear birds. Down the half-mile trail toward the ocean, across the salt marsh, a snowy egret is wading, an osprey cruising overhead, a family of wood storks foraging in the shallows.
Judy looks back and yells to me over the rumble of the ATV: “See why I come out here? This is my church.” She is right. Dawn at this beach is as transcendent as sitting in the nave at Chartres staring at stained glass.
After making our way through a very buggy bog, we hit the sand and start cruising, looking for crawls. Other than a shrimp boat trawling 500 yards offshore and a flock of low-flying pelicans in tight formation, the beach is empty. The ocean is placid, like a farm pond, and the coast of Africa looks to be just over the horizon.
Bad luck. We race the four-wheelers all the way to where the North Edisto River separates Botany Island from Seabrook Island, a tony, gated golf-and-tennis community for wealthy retirees, but we don’t see a crawl. Zip. Nada. We turn around empty handed. I am discouraged.
Then, good luck. On the way back, we run into Chris Salmonsen, a state wildlife biologist who is responsible for the section of beach next to Judy’s. We start to talk and when I tell him I am interested in turtle
volunteers, people like Judy and Sherri and April, he smiles and says he could not do his job without them. We agree to meet later and he will fill me in on the human-sea turtle relationship.
Chris, forty-six, has a background in environmental education and has worked with turtle volunteers in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina.
“Tell me about the turtle people.”
Some of them, he says, usually the men, like racing ATVs up and down the beach. They usually don’t last very long. Most of the serious volunteers are women.
He says, “A lot of the volunteers have a space in their lives that they need to fill and the turtles help them fill that space. It is like going to church on Sunday. It is their religion.”
I mention that Judy had told me exactly the same thing.
Judy is different from some of the volunteers, Chris says. She has lots going on in her life. Saving turtles is just one of the things she does. She also runs a business and is an artist.
Chris goes on. “That’s not true of all the volunteers. Some of them are completely obsessed. They wear turtle shirts all the time, and their house is covered with turtle stuff. They want everyone to know they are turtle people. It is their identity.”
Then he tells me about the time he was having dinner with a woman who was a turtle rescuer in Texas. When he ordered the shrimp special, she broke out into tears. It turns out that the woman was in a fight with local shrimpers over the use of TEDs—turtle excluder devices—that help loggerheads to escape from shrimp nets. Despite the TEDs, she believed that every shrimp cocktail translated to a dead loggerhead.
The next day I am up at dawn again, this time patrolling with Chris and his volunteers: a college student named Rosa who goes out five days a week and a photographer named Marie who is carrying a telephoto lens as long as my arm. I hop on Rosa’s ATV and we take off through the bog next to the marsh. Today, the bugs in the marsh trail are really bad—African Queen bad. They bite through our clothes; we swat constantly at them with our baseball caps. Rosa has a trickle of blood running down her leg.
We drive down the beach and hit the first crawl after only a quarter mile. Rosa spots it first, which means that she has to find the hole leading to the nest cavity. She takes one of the probes and goes to work. You use the probe to locate the narrow tunnel leading to the nest cavity. The sand in the tunnel is more loosely packed than the surrounding ground. Probing is a delicate process, requiring enough pressure to sink the tip of the probe into the sand. But if you put too much weight on it and hit the loose sand of nest hole, the probe will dive into the nest cavity and skewer some of the eggs. Probing takes a deft touch; roughly 10% of all egg losses are caused by the probes.
It takes fifteen minutes of careful repeated probing an area two feet in diameter before Rosa feels the loose sand of the tunnel. She hands me the probe so I can get a sense of what she was going for. First, I push the probe into the sand next to the tunnel. It is not going anywhere. I move it over an inch, push it down again and, bingo, the loose sand in the tunnel immediately gives. Chris gets on hands and knees and starts to dig with one hand. By the time he reaches the eggs, his entire arm is engulfed in sand. He tells me to stick my arm in the hole, to feel the egg. It is leathery like an alligator’s egg and somehow seems alive.
We fill the tunnel back up with sand, and Chris flags the nest, notes the GPS coordinates, and logs the data into his notebook. He will enter it into the computer when he gets back to his office, and it will show up online within twelve hours. We jump back on our ATVs and Chris quickly spots another crawl. He grabs the probe. We go through the drill, and are off again. I am feeling a little giddy. We have found two nests and I’ve got the sea turtle fever.
Several weeks later, I caught up with Meg Hoyle, who coordinates the volunteer program on Botany Island. I wanted her take on what makes people like Judy, Rosa, Sherri, and April get up at dawn and dig nests, fight off biting flies when it is 100 degrees in the shade, and come home smelling like rotten eggs, just to help animals that you hardly ever see, creatures that will almost certainly be munched up by predators long before they are old enough to breed.
She said, “Sometimes I don’t understand it myself. Some of the volunteers walk the beach morning after morning, and in an entire summer, they might come across twelve nests. On most mornings, they will never find a crawl and many of them will never see a single turtle all season. Yet they stick with it. They are looking for a connection with the natural world that we have gotten away from. We all need that connection with animals and the outdoors.”
THE ANTHROZOOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Meg is right. Most people feel the need to connect with animals and nature. But we have this need to varying degrees. There are not many Michael Mountains, people who will not kill the ants invading their kitchens. There are, however, scads of Judy Muzzis, people who have jobs and families, people who are doing what they can in small ways to connect with animals, and are not particularly bothered by inconsistencies in their interactions with other species. They don’t agonize over whether one should throw a switch that would send a hypothetical train careening into an old man or a group of endangered chimpanzees. They don’t care whether the correct route to animal liberation runs through Bentham or Kant. Nor do they feel guilty over the fact that they refuse to eat beef but wear leather shoes.
I have—mostly—come to accept my own hypocrisies. The yahoo within me says that it is better to let Tilly outside than keep her imprisoned in the house all day even though I know she occasionally kills a towhee or a chipmunk. The yahoo tells me that the exquisite taste of slow-cooked pit barbecue somehow justifies the death of the hog whose loin I am going to slather with a pepper-based dry rub.
Moral intuitions change, however, and sometimes the yahoo and I make new arrangements. I quit fishing when I no longer found satisfaction in yanking a brown trout from a mountain stream. I don’t eat veal anymore, we buy local eggs, and I am willing to pay more for a “free-range” chicken because I prefer to think it led a better life than a standard Cobb 500. And when an old rooster fighter recently asked me if I would like to go with him to a five-cock derby in Kentucky, I said no thanks.
When I first started studying human-animal interactions I was troubled by the flagrant moral incoherance I have described in these pages—vegetarians who sheepishly admitted to me they ate meat; cockfighters who proclaimed their love for their roosters; purebred dog enthusiasts whose desire to improve their breed has created generations of genetically defective animals; hoarders who caused untold suffering to the creatures living in filth they claim to have rescued. I have come to believe that these sorts of contradictions are not anomalies or hypocrisies. Rather, they are inevitable. And they show we are human.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, director of the Center for Human Values at Prince ton, is sometimes asked what he does for a living. When he replies that he is a philosopher, the next question is usually, “So, what’s your philosophy?” His standard response is, “My philosophy is that everything is more complicated than you thought.”
What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives—the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat—are, likewise, more complicated than we thought.
RECOMMENDED READING
ANTHROZOOLOGY
Arluke, A., and Bogdan, R. (2010). Beauty and the Beast: Human-Animal Relationships as Revealed in Real Post Cards. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Bekoff, M., ed. (2007). Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Kalof, L. (2007). Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion Books.
Ritvo, H. (1989). The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Serpell, J. (1996). In The Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
PSYCHOLOGY AND HU
MAN-ANIMAL INTERACTIONS
Bulliet, R. W. (2005). Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships. New York: Columbia University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Melson, L. G. (2001). Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, E. O. (1992). Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
PETS
Anderson, P. E. (2008). The Powerful Bond between Pets and People. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Grier, K. C. (2006). Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Irvine, L. (2004). If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Zawistowski, S. (2008). Companion Animals in Society. Clifton Park, NY: Thompson Delmar Learning.
DOGS
Coppinger, R., and Coppinger, L. (2002). Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Horowitz, A. (2009). Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. New York: Scribner.
McConnell, P. B. (2002). The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do around Dogs. New York: Ballantine Books.
Miklósi, A. (2007) Dog Behavior, Evolution, and Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sanders, C. (1999). Understanding Dogs: Living and Working with Canine Companions. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Schaffer, M. (2006). One Nation under Dog. New York: Henry Holt.