Erosion affecting hawksbill turtles breeding ground
Gales Point Manatee Village is not only a home to the Kriol tradition but also to a large number of wildlife including manatees, loggerheads and the endangered hawksbill turtles. The abundance of wildlife prompted villagers to have the area declared a wildlife sanctuary on August fourth 1998. But since then the sanctuary has been surviving primarily on the efforts of volunteers from the village. Kevin Andrewin, the Chairperson of the wildlife sanctuary stopped by our studios today and said past storms have not only affected village life but have also caused beach erosion to critical areas that serve as nesting grounds for the hawksbill turtles.
Kevin Andrewin, Chairman, Gales Point Wildlife Sanctuary
“A Hawksbill, which is a critical endangered species, come up in site six to lay and what happened due to the erosion from the flood that we had last year, it damaged a big part of our beach and it got trapped between two trees and it was there for like a day and a half. It almost died so Francisco called my attention and what happened we took it into village and gave it some water for the dehydration. It gained strength and then we released it the night after with a group of students from the Belize Zoo. Normally what happens is that these turtles return to the beach every two to three years and at that time the beach is eroded and they don’t know it, they still try to fight their way up so that they could next. The danger of it now is that—the reason why we moved it is because we have a lot of aliens working and if they see a sea turtle on the beach, they’re gonna eat it. And we don’t we don’t really have enough funding. So we wah try seek funding so that we could have daily patrols, not only to protect the nest but to protect the species. For these turtles they are not familiar with the new nesting ground until they come up and get trapped then they might try find ways of shifting. But for us to learn that and do that we need to put on a satellite tag at least on one turtle to study the migration pattern.”
Andrewin says that there have been other recent occurrences of turtles being trapped in the area.
