Happy/Sad.

Baby Turtles Seize the Day
By LESLIE KAUFMAN



A baby Kemp ridley turtle at Padre Island National Seashore heads for gulf waters.

In May, I wrote about an endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle off the coast of Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, highlighting the danger that the gulf oil spill poses to these ancient endangered animals. Since then, hundreds of Kemp’s Ridley and other sea turtles have been found stranded or dead, some of them covered in oil, although it is unclear whether the oil played a role in their deaths.

I focused on Turtle No. 15, nicknamed Thelma by a National Park Service employee. (Thelma is a survivor in her own right: her mother laid her eggs on a beach that was covered by oil during the 1979 Ixtoc I spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the eggs were airlifted to safety.)

Thelma had just laid a clutch of eggs on the beach at Padre Island and was preparing to lay another. Donna J. Shaver, the chief of sea turtle science and recovery for the Park Service at Padre Island, scooped up the eggs, incubated them and waited for them to hatch.

Dr. Shaver does this with all of the turtle eggs she finds to give the offspring a better chance of survival. At a critical moment after they hatch and their energy builds, she takes the babies to the beach so they can enter the waves and “imprint” their home, knowing to return there someday.

This morning she sent me pictures of Thelma’s hatchlings, headed for the sea. Here are a couple of them.

Good luck out there, guys!

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/for-baby-turtles-a-test-of-survival/