It hadn’t really been on our radar, but Bundaberg seems to
have more to offer than at first glance.
Our plan originally was to have an easy am and head back to do the Bundy
museum before making some progress up the east coast. However, Si had seen a van around town with
mention that it was ‘turtle season’. How
did we not know this?! I quickly did
some online research and found that a world-renowned turtle centre at Mon Repos
beach was 20 minutes east of us, just on the coast by Bundaberg and that each
night they take 300 people on guided ranger walks, onto the secured beach. This is where more than 50% of the remaining
endangered Loggerhead turtles in the southern hemisphere come to lay their eggs
between November and January. We were in
exactly the right place at the right time!
The website said that the only place to get tickets was at the Bundaberg
VC.
We hot-footed it there, doubting
that we would manage to get on tonight’s tours in a million years. As soon as I said why we were there, the lady
at reception shook her head and said ‘I’m sure we’re sold out for tonight’ but
thankfully checked with the expert ‘turtle desk’ who corrected her by saying
‘no, we’ve literally got two spaces left’.
They had been ringing people on
the waiting list to try and offload these tickets but got no reply. You snooze, you lose people! We bagged those tickets without a moment’s
hesitation. I was amazed and incredibly
excited! How lucky are we sometimes? I mean, really, we don’t deserve to get
away with this stuff like we do!
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| I do like a good comedy shop name.... |
This meant that we had another whole day in Bundaberg to
entertain ourselves whilst we waited for our tour which didn’t start until 7pm.
Well, as I said, it turns out that is ‘too easy’ as they
like to say here.
We started with the Bert Hinkler Aviation museum in the
Botanic Gardens (ticks boxes for both of us then!). Bert was born and raised in Bundaberg and was
the first pilot to fly solo from Britain to Australia in 1928 and, three years
later, he made the first solo flight across the South Atlantic. Sadly, he died in an aviation accident in
Tuscany, Italy in 1933. On the way into
the museum I commented on a house in the gardens about how ‘British’ it
looked. And it was. It was Bert’s house from Southampton, called
Mon Repos! When Australia heard that
their aviation hero’s home in the UK was booked for demolition, they jumped
into action and arranged for the entire property to be taken down and relocated
here to his home town. This was in 1964
and here it is still standing today….
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| Bert Hinkler's Southampton home... |
We had a wander around the Botanic
garden which had some amazing birds and turtles and eels in the ponds.
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| Short-finned eel |
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| Crane |
We popped back into the Bundaberg rum museum to get our rum
knowledge completely up to speed. But, Bundaberg produces another famous drink
and we went to visit it’s home, the Bundaberg Barrel.
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| The Bundaberg Barrel |
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| A fine selection of non-alcoholic pop |
This company produce non-alcoholic carbonated
drinks. We have been enjoying their refreshing
lemon, lime and bitters around the whole nation. It’s hard to explain the taste as we don’t
get bitters in the UK, but we were informed it is created with a combination of
herbs. In the barrel itself, we were
invited to taste their entire range. We
both enjoyed the cream soda and there were some lovely fruity concoctions
amongst the recipes so by the end we were really full of pop. As they’d been so
generous, we thought we’d buy a couple to squeeze into our tiny fridge.
With the possibility of a very late night ahead, we needed
some downtime. So, we checked in to the
nearest campsite to the turtles, Begara Caravan Park. It had a lovely, large unpowered grassed section
where we relaxed and had dinner. The
only thing that wasn’t relaxing was the mosquitos!
We arrived at the turtle centre just in time for 7pm, where
we received a sticker which gave you a group number depending on how long ago
you booked. No surprises, we were in the
very last group, group 5! Basically,
when the first ‘turtle event’ happened, group one would be invited to go and
watch, and so on, until it would be our turn.
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| Model of a loggerhead turtle in the centre |
There was plenty to keep us occupied at the centre from looking
at exhibits about the conservation work and learning about the turtles, to
watching documentaries in the amphitheatre.
In not much time at all, ‘group one’ got called to go and watch a female
laying her eggs on the beach. They have teams of rangers and volunteers
patrolling the beach in complete darkness because any light or movement can
spook the females and putt them off coming onto the beach to lay. The rangers radio into the centre when they
have an ‘event’ unfolding. Groups 2 and 3 went in quick succession. Each time it was for a laying event. It is a little early in the season for the
eggs to be hatching as they incubate for at least 6-8 weeks.
Here’s an interesting turtle fact for you – the temperature
of the sand around their nest determines the sex of the hatchlings. Here in Mon Repos, the warm, dark sand
produces mostly female hatchlings whilst the cool, white sands of the Barrier
Reef Islands produce mostly males.
Fascinating.
Finally, it was our turn, at about 10pm. Our group were given strict instructions
about turning off all mobile phones, watches and anything that would emit
light. We would be seeing a totally different event. Eleven flatback turtle hatchlings had been
‘notched’ (a specific shape cut into their shells for permanent identification)
and they were ready to be released. We headed
onto the beach. I don’t know how the
volunteers do it. It was pitch black and
really hard to not trip over rocks. The
other thing we noticed straight away were the stars. Without any ambient light the sky was covered
in stars, we could see so many more than on a normal night. It shows how rare it is in our world to be
somewhere so remote that there were no houses or street lighting.
Before the hatchings were released they were shown around
the group and we even got to feel the power of their tiny flippers and take a
couple of photos.
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| Flatback turtle hatchlings (my hands for scale) |
Before they
were released we were lined up on the beach, with several of the younger
turtleers placed strategically with a torch pointing at the ground and their feet
wide apart. The hatchlings were much
faster than I expected. They really
wanted to get to that water! With the
assistance of some torch light (they naturally head for the lightest part of
the horizon which should be the surface of the water shimmering in the
moonlight), off they went, running between the feet of the volunteers and
disappearing beneath the waves. What an amazing experience. The sad fact is
that these tiny hatchlings face so many natural predators and human-caused
risks at sea that only 1 in 1000 hatchlings survive. It is purely a game of numbers. They must lay so many thousand eggs for the
species to survive. Another interesting
fact is that it takes 20-30 years, depending on species, for them to mature and
after mating the females return to lay eggs on the very same section of beach.
The males, however, will never set flipper on land again for the rest of their
lives.
We were shown back to centre and chose to keep waiting.
People had started leaving, having seen what they’d come for, or to take
youngsters home to bed. But the hardy few like us, who hadn’t seen a laying
event, held on. We were told they
wouldn’t shut the centre until about 1am.
We watched another documentary, this time about those ‘lost years’
between hatching and maturing 20-30 years later. Where do all those hatchlings go? Due to transmitters fitted to hatchlings,
scientists have been able to show that the loggerhead hatchlings from this part
of the Australian Coast are swept south and then east, past the north tip of
New Zealand before crossing the entire South Pacific Ocean to the west coast of
South America. There are rich feeding
grounds here where they grow and gain strength for years before finally making
the return journey, spending more years drifting in the currents of the Pacific
until they make it back to Australian waters.
What an epic voyage! I mentioned the human risk factor the hatchlings
face. Well, the whole ‘plastic’ issue is a very hot potato at the moment and
this has a direct effect on these creatures.
They eat jellyfish, tiny translucent jellyfish that float just under the
surface of the ocean…. Like a plastic carrier bag or parts of one does. The turtles can’t tell the difference, they ingest
the plastic and this causes blockages in their digestive system that I turn causes
them to starve to death. Horrible. Times must change as we do not consider the
dire effects of something as simple as not knowing where that carrier bag we
use is going to end up because it is just too convenient for us.
It was getting later and people were starting to fall asleep
in the auditorium. Finally, about 1130pm,
we were notified that a female loggerhead turtle had come onto beach. It was very carefully organised – we were led
to the beach but had to wait until she had almost finished digging her ‘pit’
before we could approach, in case she was frightened away. The rangers had positioned a torch in a gap
underneath the turtle, so when we first arrived we could literally see only the
business end, pointed back towards the waterline. There is no dignity in this for the turtles!
Strangely, the turtles seem to go into a kind of trance at
this stage, so they are not disturbed by us despite how careful we had to be earlier
on. Having finished digging she started
laying. We could see the oval white eggs
dropping into the nest. It wasn’t just
one at a time, they appeared in flows, much more quickly than I expected.
Whilst she was laying, the rangers moved in to measure her
shell (or carapace) and try to identify her.
Excitingly, she appeared to be a new turtle with no tag! This meant a couple of things – she had
appeared here very late in the season to be laying her first batch of eggs, so she
must be about 30 years old and this could be the very first time she had
returned to land since hatching here some 30 years ago!
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| The best image of our laying female I could get |
Once the laying was finished, she wasted no time in starting
to fill the hole, using her back flippers first, then the front. There was sand going everywhere and the
rangers were having a tough time trying to tag her as she was moving about so
much. It took them three attempts and at
the cost of a volunteer needing hospital treatment when her shin was
accidentally sliced open by the turtle’s flipper in the struggle. There was a lot of blood and she probably
required stitches. It was very
impressive how quickly the sand level returned to that of the beach. The depth of the nests averages 60cm but you
wouldn’t know there was a nest there after she finished. Happy with her work, and never to see her
babies again or need to provide them with any care, the turtle made her way
back to the sea and we followed to see her off.
We returned up the beach to find the volunteers were digging up her
nest! They were not happy, stating that it was too low and the eggs may be
destroyed by a high tide, so they had decided to relocate the nest further up
the dunes.
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| Her eggs were laid out in rows of ten to make it easier to count |
This could be seen as controversial
don’t you think? Where should we draw
the line with human involvement? Aren’t
we meant to let nature take its course?
Survival of the fittest and all that?
Well, here they argue that this species has been hunted and slaughtered
to near extinction thanks to the actions of man. Queensland’s Loggerhead population has
declined by over 80% since the 1970s. So
maybe we have a responsibility to try and save them as it’s our fault that
their numbers have got so incredibly low?
Sounds like a pretty good argument to me.
Exhausted and emotional, we didn’t get back to our car until
130am! We couldn’t wait to get back to
the campsite and get to bed. With one
problem. We couldn’t get in. Our gate
code didn’t work, so we had to ring the warden who wasn’t impressed,
understandably! We found a grassy spot that we guessed would be shady in the
morning and collapsed.
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