Oh my gosh! we saw baby turtles, or tortugas in Spanish. They were about the size of a lime and sooooo cute. We were in Todos Santos (in Baja Sur) at a turtle recovery center. That means they save turtles by digging up the mamas’ nests and moving them to nests in hot greenhouse. When we got there, we talked about and looked at new baby turtles, hatched just that day. Then we got in the greenhouse and watched a volunteer girl start digging up a nest that had been there for 55 days. When she got to the turtles and pulled them up we were all like, “Ahhhhhh. So cute!” And some were still attached to eggs, so those she set aside because they still need to get out by themselves, which only took a few minutes. Some eggs weren’t hatched and those went back into the nest and got covered up.

We went out and waited until the sun went down. They told us that we had to wait until then because the birds and other predators can’t see them at that time so it’s safer to put them out then. We waited for about 20 minutes and finally the time had come! We got our bucket ofturtles, and I was the one from our family that got to carry it, and they make a line and you can’t go past the line because the baby turtles can get stuck in your footprints and that wastes their energy and makes it very dangerous for them.

At the line, I was the first one to dump out my bucket. One of the turtles was flipped over on his back for like 10 minutes and we named him Little Buddy. We slowly watched the pitter-patter on the sand. The waves would come and grab them and they’d get tumbled and tumbled and tumbled. But the finally made it into the ocean! Little Buddy was the last one from my bucket to make it but he still did a great job. He’s going to be one strong turtle!

We learned that when they get to the ocean they have 12 hours of darkness to find protection. Their protection is a piece of driftwood, seaweed, even plastic, that they hold onto and stay there for one or two days. They eat all the kelp and other things that live on it and when that runs out they start swimming. When they get big they eat jellyfish. Jellyfish have a lot of proteinand other nutrients that the turtles need. In 8-10 years they come back to the same beach and lay their eggs and the process starts over again.