Michael Viney: Efforts continue to protect leatherback and loggerhead turtles

The tribal shield hanging on my workroom wall is not a tribal shield at all but the carapace of a loggerhead turtle, some 60cm long. Its warlike look is enhanced by bony spikes around the edge where our dog, scenting the creature buried between the leeks and potatoes, chewed off the carapace rim.

I had to go back four decades of Another Life to find my drawing of the loggerhead lolling in the wheelbarrow as I pushed it up from the tideline. It was very dead and smelly so I was glad not to meet anyone on the boreen.

1982 seems to have been a year for beachcombing dead turtles because I found another in December, this time a little Kemp’s Ridley from the Gulf of Mexico. Stunned into death by the cold of the north Atlantic, it went off to be pickled in the “dead zoo” at Dublin’s Natural History Museum.

Kemp’s ridley, as round as a dinner plate and named for a Florida fisherman, is the rarest, smallest and most vulnerable of the hard-shell turtles reaching Ireland. Hatched on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico in the sort of mass event familiar from wildlife television, it heads off into currents that carry it into the North Atlantic Gyre and on to the stormy coasts of these islands.

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The loggerhead turtle, too, mostly arrives as a juvenile, some three or four years into an oceanic stage of its life. Hatched at well-protected “rookeries” from Florida to North Carolina and at a newly documented site in the Cape Verde islands, it may take a female more than 30 years to reach sexual maturity and return to dig a sandy trench for her eggs.

Loggerheads that wash up on the Irish western beaches in winter, often in the wake of storms, may be totally comatose, but can sometimes be restored and released after expert care in an aquarium.

Dingle Oceanworld has rehabilitated seven loggerheads, slowly restoring their bodyweight with feeds of fish and healing flipper injuries (often from shark bites) before release into the wild.

In 1984 I was engaged by the passionate crusade of a young amateur naturalist out to save the lives of the biggest turtle in the world, the leatherback

In December Galway Atlantaquaria attempted to revive a loggerhead found stranded on its back on rocks near Carna, but raising its temperature from cold shock were eventually unsuccessful.

In Donegal in 2019 a loggerhead some nine months old and weighing only a few hundred grammes was found on the beach by a local family and taken to the Exploris Aquarium in Co Down. Restored to 25 kilos Aer Lingus flew it to a wildlife centre in Gran Canaria last September. The Azores in the mid-Atlantic are a favoured gathering ground for loggerheads.

So much for the hard-shell turtles, swept to the northern edge of their ocean arena. Most sightings and records of turtles around Ireland, however, are of a creature on a very different scale.

In 1984 I was engaged by the passionate crusade of a young amateur naturalist out to save the lives of the biggest turtle in the world, the leatherback. This is the one with a huge carapace-like hard black rubber, ridged from front to back, and flippers with a spread of some 2 metres. Hatched on a beach in Venezuela its northward migration to these islands is a purposeful journey to summer seas full of jellyfish.

I imagined this boyish, gentle figure in a Killybegs fisherman's bar, engaging the men in blue jerseys

Gabriel King became involved with Ireland's leatherbacks when he found one caught in a drift net and persuaded its attendant fishermen to let it go in Quilty Co Clare. At that time, the turtle was often seen as rare and strange and hauled ashore for public wonder. My first encounter was at such a display on a slipway at Achill: I noted the "tears" at the animal's eyes, excreting salt from its diet of jellyfish as it slowly expired on the quay.

King was shocked to discover that the leatherback had no protection in wildlife law (it does now, largely thanks to him). He set out on his bicycle to visit every fishing harbour, collecting records of the leatherbacks and pleading for their disentanglement from nets and ropes and long-lines. I imagined this boyish, gentle figure in a Killybegs fisherman’s bar, engaging the men in blue jerseys.

Today King has the active backing of Simon Berrow, of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group. And he's out there, still on mission but this time officially for Northern Ireland's Environment and Heritage Service.

He took five months in 2006 to visit “every port, harbour, jetty and marina” on the northern Irish coast, from Carlingford Lough to Lough Foyle. It yielded 65 new turtle records, mostly of leatherbacks, and further evidence of coastal goodwill. Fishermen “continue to go to great lengths”, King reported, “often at great personal risk, to release without harm turtles incidentally caught in nets and ropes”.