UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2003

Departments

Extended Family

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Experiencing Jeff Corwin

Drawing on the past

Clean-up at the old Davis Mine

Extended Family

Intensive Caring

Charles Creekmore ’95




	photo by Ben Barnhart

UTTER THE WORDS "WASH-ASHORE" ON Cape Cod and the locals know exactly what you mean. This wry putdown, pronounced “wash-a-show-wah,” refers to any newcomer whose Cape Cod lineage doesn’t go back several generations.

To Robert Prescott ’73, “wash-ashore” might also suggest a double-meaning. Beyond its reference to fledgling “Codders,” it could just as easily refer to the scores of cold-shocked sea turtles that wash up on the beaches of Cape Cod Bay every November and December.

Prescott, you see, is director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. Late fall at the sanctuary is the “wash-up window,” when Prescott’s troop of 100 volunteers patrols beaches from Barnstable to Truro looking for impaired turtles whose body temperatures have fallen too low to function. Ironically enough, these particular wash-ashores were beaching here long before the Pilgrims first landed on the Cape four centuries ago.

“The reason sea turtles wash ashore at the Cape is because it’s a geological accident,” explains Prescott. “It was formed 15,000 to 18,000 years ago by glacial action as a hook that bends seaward and literally blocks turtles from migrating southward. They get confused and caught up in Cape Cod Bay.”

In other words, Cape Cod is one immense, 60-mile-long, turtle trap. Henry David Thoreau described the Cape’s flexing shape quite eloquently as “the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts.”

In fact, Thoreau once observed a sea turtle washing up in the harbor at Wellfleet as the writer was having breakfast. The stranded turtle caused quite a stir, mainly because it was considered a culinary gift from the sea.

And therein lies a tale, since the human appetite for sea turtles is the main reason why the saltwater reptiles are in trouble, especially the Atlantic Ridley, one of the most endangered species on earth. Due largely to human predation, the total number of nesting Ridleys was down to 500 in the mid-’80s. Now, because of concerted conservation efforts, including rescue patrols by Prescott’s legion of guardian angels, the number of nesting females is back up to about 1,800.

Since Prescott was appointed director of the sanctuary in 1982, he has collected a wealth of new research information about sea turtles, especially Ridleys. Ridleys nest on only one beach in the whole world: Rancho Nuevo on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Their early years sound like a metaphor for wayward youth. The hatchlings spend their first two years in a “seaweed drift colony,” influenced by a series of currents that channel them into the northbound Gulf Stream. Many Ridleys follow the Gulf Stream on a circular cruise that circumvents the entire North Atlantic and returns them to their permanent home in the Gulf of Mexico. Others “drop out” along our Atlantic Coast and later go south for the winter. That’s when many of them blunder into Cape Cod Bay.

Once they’re dazed and confused by the Cape’s accidental geology, sea turtles get stressed-out when water temperatures begin dropping below 65 degrees F. each fall. Eventually, they slip into a stupor and drift ashore.

When Prescott and his turtle troopers began their patrols in 1982, they were rescuing about 18 turtles a year, most of them Ridleys, most of them two or three years old. That tally has jumped in recent years to as many as 278 in 1999 and 201 this year, numbers which reflect the burgeoning Ridley population made possible by conservation measures.

Prescott’s volunteers follow a regular triage protocol. During the wash-up window, they patrol after every high tide to find beached turtles before they’re overexposed to the elements. Recovered turtles are then treated at the Wellfleet sanctuary and rushed via a special “turtle ambulance service” to New England Aquarium in Boston for intensive care. Some 70 percent of the washed-up reptiles are saved in this manner and later released into warmer waters down south.

The bad news is that Cape Cod will continue to be a tender trap for sea turtles, which, like starry-eyed tourists, suffer a fatal attraction to all its charms.

“The good news for turtles,” as Prescott notes, “is that the Cape is only going to be here for another 25,000 years or so.”

That’s the mere blink of an eye in “wash-ashore” terms.

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