VELAS, India — Little kids giddily squeal as a baby sea turtle, flippers flapping, lurches toward the water with the grace of a drunk lunging for a cab at closing time. Tourists applaud as about a dozen more palm-sized hatchlings stumble into the sea.
The tourists had gathered at daybreak on an April day for the Velas Turtle Festival, on the western Indian coast, where volunteers invite visitors to watch them release baby turtles from a hatchery — like an animal pen on the sand.
The volunteers collected the eggs from turtle nests on the shore, effectively holes that females dig with their flippers, and where they lay dozens of eggs at a time. The eggs are taken inside the hatchery to protect them from predators, such as dogs and gulls.
Once the babies hatch, they're released under supervision to ensure the predators don't pick them off as they crawl to the sea. Even after all those efforts, most of them will be killed by predators in the waters. Only one out of every 1,000 olive ridleys is likely to ever reach maturity.
The slim survival rate of olive ridley sea turtles comes with other pressures that have left them listed as "vulnerable" to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, even as they inhabit a global band of tropical waters. And for decades, conservationists feared their populations would collapse across India. They were suffocating after being caught in fishnets — turtles need to come up for air, just like humans. They were slaughtered at scale for meat and leather. Their eggs were poached.
Kartik Shanker, a leading Indian sea turtle expert and author of From Soup to Superstar, says around 20 years ago, conservationists counted no more than 100,000 turtle nests across the country. The threats to olive ridleys "were significant, and if they had been allowed to continue unabated, we may have seen the crashes that we were predicting."
"But when some measure of protection was put in place," he says, "these turtles, olive ridley turtles, have rebounded." During the past winter's nesting season, he says conservationists counted "about a million nests, which is crazy high."
Protection efforts in India include seasonal fishing bans, protected coastal zones — and events like the Velas Turtle Festival.
It attracts visitors like IT specialist Anuja Bhingare, who took an overnight bus after seeing the festival on Instagram. "It's very nice to see baby turtles taking their first step into their home," she says. Her friend, Madhuri Dixit (no relation to the Indian movie star with the same name), says she worries that if more tourists come, "they will make the place dirty," by throwing trash on the beach.
Garbage is a problem, acknowledges festival manager Virendra Ramesh Patel. He says he pays villagers to keep the beach tidy — about the equivalent of $3 per week.
Patel says a lot has changed here. His grandparents used to poach turtle eggs to make omelettes with coconut milk, tomatoes and onions. "Chicken eggs are dull in comparison," he laughs.
The festival began with luck about a decade ago, says founder Mohan Upadhye, who sports a turtle tattoo emblazoned with "save me." Conservationists thought olive ridleys had disappeared from this area decades ago, but in the early 2000s, a worker from an environmental charity stumbled onto a turtle egg shell nearby.
Soon, Upadhye was helping the charity identify turtle nesting sites and he fell "in love with sea turtles," he says. He convinced the Velas council to ban seaside construction to protect nesting sites — because some of the surviving females born on this beach will return to lay their own eggs. Olive ridleys uniquely will sometimes nest in a synchronized event known as arribada — Spanish for "arrival" — where more than a thousand turtles, sometimes tens of thousands, nest on the same beach over a period of days, including on the eastern Indian coast of Odisha. Upadhye says it's why protecting nesting sites is key to protecting the species.
Upadhye set up hatcheries and incentivized conservation efforts by establishing the turtle festival. It lasts for the two-month hatching season that starts in April.
While olive ridley populations have rebounded across India, they still face grave threats. In January, hundreds of dead turtles washed up near the eastern city of Chennai. They appeared to have suffocated in fishing nets of illegal trawlers. They face newer problems, like eating plastic dumped in the ocean, which Upadhye says they seem to confuse for "their favorite food — jellyfish."
And Shanker, the turtle expert, worries that now that their numbers appear to be rebounding, there will be more pressure to loosen protections. "I can see a Port Development Authority saying, why shouldn't I build a port here? You said that the ridleys were endangered, but apparently they're not."
Shanker hopes more conservationists can work with local communities to profit from the turtles' rebound — whether through eco-tourism like Velas, or sustainable harvesting of turtle meat or eggs.
Much of the effort to protect India's sea turtles traces back to one man: Satish Bhaskar. A documentary about him was released this year called Turtle Walker.
Bhaskar earned the name after he spent years walking some 2,500 miles across India's shorelines to study turtles, creating a baseline of data that served researchers for decades.
Director Taira Malaney says she made the film to show "the power of one person to be able to make an impact on such a grand scale."
Bhaskar mentored other budding conservationists, creating a lineage of turtle people that reaches all the way down to Upadhye in Velas. His mentors, he says, were mentored by Bhaskar.
And Upadhye hopes that among the tourists who cheer on the baby turtles crawling into the sea during the Velas Turtle Festival, there'll be people who will accept the torch he wants to pass on, of turtle conservation.
"This is the time that we have to make future generations aware," he says. "We have to fight."
Copyright 2025 NPR
