JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
There's a village on India's western coast where tourists gather...
UNIDENTIFIED TOURIST #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED TOURIST #2: (Non-English language spoken).
SUMMERS: ...To cheer on baby turtles that are trying to crawl into the sea.
(CHEERING)
SUMMERS: The turtles are olive ridleys. They inhabit a band of tropical waters around the world, and they are considered threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But as NPR's Diaa Hadid reports, efforts like the Veras (ph) Turtle Festival are helping them thrive.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Tourists watch volunteers gather newly hatched turtles from inside a hatchery. It's like an animal pen on the sand.
UNIDENTIFIED TOURIST #3: Oh.
HADID: These turtle eggs had been collected a few weeks ago from the Velas shore from turtle nests - that is a hole dug by a female olive ridley with her flippers, where she lays dozens of eggs inside. The volunteers dug them out and put them in this hatchery to protect them from predators like dogs and gulls.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING)
HADID: Volunteers plop the wriggly little hatchlings onto the sand.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Ah, see, nana (ph), the turtles are running.
HADID: Kids squeal as the hatchlings lurch towards the sea.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Where are they going? Where are they going?
HADID: The babies reach the frothy, salty fringe. Waves pull them in. Tourists clap.
(APPLAUSE)
HADID: The Velas Turtle Festival has run for about a decade. It's the brainchild of local Mohan Upadhye. We meet in his garden.
I see you have a tattoo on your arm that says...
MOHAN UPADHYE: Yes.
HADID: ...Save me.
A turtle tattoo.
UPADHYE: It's having two meanings. If people will save me, then I will save him.
UPADHYE: Save humans from ecological destruction. He says conservationists thought olive ridleys disappeared from these parts in the '90s, for the same reasons that their populations were collapsing across India over the decades - swept up in fishing nets, butchered for their leather and meat, their eggs poached. But Upadhye says in the early aughts, a worker from a local nature charity stumbled onto a turtle eggshell on the Velas shore. Pretty soon, Upadhye was helping the charity identify turtle nesting sites.
UPADHYE: I was in love with sea turtles.
HADID: He convinced villagers to ban seaside construction to protect the nesting sites because at least some of the surviving females born on this beach will return to it to lay their own eggs. It's not clear why olive ridley turtles do that, but it's why protecting their nesting sites is so key to protecting the species. Upadhye created incentives for locals to support his efforts, like creating the Velas Turtle Festival, which brings tourists and their money to town. Now...
UPADHYE: There are two villages who are replicating this model.
HADID: Since they began work, Upadhye says, they've gone from finding sporadic turtle nests to counting about 70 over the last nesting season. Patchwork efforts like this around the country have staved off an expected collapse in olive ridley numbers. Kartik Shanker is one of India's preeminent experts on olive ridley turtles. He says across India last year, conservation has counted...
KARTIK SHANKER: About a million nests, which is crazy high.
HADID: ...A million turtle nests.
SHANKER: Seems to me that olive ridley turtles have bounced back quite substantially.
HADID: But still, they are designated globally as threatened, and they're still facing dangers in India. Much of the effort, though, to protect India's sea turtles can be traced back to one man - Satish Bhaskar. A documentary was made about him last year called "The Turtle Walker." Bhaskar earned the name after he spent years walking some 2,500 miles across India's shorelines to map turtle habitats. He says in the documentary...
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "TURTLE WALKER")
SATISH BHASKAR: I couldn't stop thinking about these very mysterious animals.
HADID: The data that Bhaskar produced has guided conservationists for decades.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS SINGING)
HADID: Back in the village of Velas, Mohan Upadhye, who created the turtle festival, says of Satish Bhaskar, the Turtle Walker...
UPADHYE: He's actually God.
HADID: He says it's not just the data Bhaskar produced, it's the awe inspired for sea turtles.
(CROSSTALK)
HADID: And Upadhye hopes that among the tourists who cheer on the baby turtles crawling into the sea during the Velas Turtle Festival...
(CHEERING)
HADID: ...He'll find new people who have that awe for sea turtles and who'll protect them for another generation. Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Velas. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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