Dear friends and supporters of Turtle Foundation,
The days are getting longer again in the northern hemisphere, and slowly the temperatures are rising. Spring is here, and Easter is just around the corner!
This year we have a special Easter egg for you; just in time for the holidays, we are extremely pleased to present our latest annual report:
Download Annual Report 2020
Among other topics, in our annual report you will learn about the impact of the Corona pandemic on our projects during the last year, and how, thanks to the creativity of our collaborators and supporters, we were able to make great progresses anyway. One example is our fight against the turtle shell trade in Indonesia, more you will find in the report.
The leatherbacks are back in our Sumatra projects!
The new year started well for the Turtle Foundation team despite all the constraints. But in Indonesia, the sea turtles surprised us directly in double respects:
When not a single leatherback turtle showed up to nest on our project beach on Sipora Island during the nesting season 2019/2020, we were very concerned that this particularly small and endangered nesting population might already be extinct. These worries grew further when leatherback turtles still failed to nest during the first few months of the 2020/2021 nesting season. But finally, in January, the first leatherback female appeared for nesting on the Buggeisiata beach of Sipora! In the meantime, the first hatchlings managed to successfully reach the sea and disappeared into a perilous but hopefully for many of them successful life.
At the end of January, our staff started work in our new leatherback conservation project on Selaut Besar. We were quickly able to confirm the assumptions of our earlier research: Four of the seven extant sea turtle species nest on this small island in the Indonesian province of Aceh!
P.S.: Have you ever thought about adopting a sea turtle? By taking over a symbolic adoption you support the urgently needed conservation work of Turtle Foundation and furthermore, it is a great gift for family and friends:
To the sea turtle adoption: information and online form