May 18,2003
Great Sea Turtle Adventure

The night of 18th May 2003 was dark, even though the stars were out and shone silkily in the sky. Babar Hussain, WWF – Pakistan’s Turtle Conservation Officer was out on one of his nightly rounds of Sandspit Beach in Karachi. He walked the whole length of the beach, then, towards dawn, turned inwards into the backwaters mudflat.
It was then that he saw her.
She was half buried in the mud, her shell dry and scratchy. Her snout was in a little puddle of water. As he watched, she raised her head and looked at him wearily, hopelessly. She flapped her flippers, but couldn’t get out of the mud: she was stuck fast.

A female green turtle, so far from the seashore?
She seemed exhausted, as well she might – she must have been struggling for hours to get back to the sea. The mudflat was on the other side of the Sandspit-Hawkesbay road from the sea. A victim of – what? Loss of her sense of direction or something else?
She opened her mouth to gulp in air, and Babar came out of his reverie. She had to be rescued. And fast.
The trouble was, adult green turtles can weigh anything up to 300 pounds, and the seashore was at least 30 meters away: Babar couldn’t carry her alone. He had to get help.
But it was dawn, and nobody on the beach. Looking around frantically, Babar finally spotted two motorbikes roaring along on the road, and ran at them, waving his arms wildly to make them stop.
The first instinct of the four young men on the motorbikes, when they saw this wild looking man coming at them, was to run. Later they couldn’t be sure what exactly made them stop. The reasoning might have been that after all, there were four of them, and only one of him..!
They stopped. In great gulps of breath Babar explained that there was a green turtle stuck in a whole lot of mud, and could they help him get her out and carry her to the sea?
Always ready for a bit of adventure, Uzair, Ahmad, Rizwan and Farhanullah decided to trust this man who claimed friendship to this exotic creature of the sea. Babar led them off.
And sure enough, there she was. She looked even more tired than before, and now she was afraid too, because she wasn’t used to human beings. How was she to know that they came bearing help?
Babar patted her on the head, trying to sooth her, and then the five of them dug into the mud that was holding her. Then they tried to lift her up.
She was too heavy.
Knowing they might cause her harm, they were at their wits’ end when Uzair realized that he was wearing a thin shawl around his neck. Happily, he spread it on the ground and, bit by bit, they maneuvered her onto it. Then they picked up the shawl by the corners, and started half walking, half shuffling over the road and the soft, powdery sand to the water.
It was not an easy journey. Several times they nearly fell, and once Rizwan stepped into a ditch and the load nearly fell on one side. It was doubly uncomfortable for the turtle, bumping along the beach, specially since she couldn’t really understand what was happening.
Huffing and puffing, they got to the water and put the turtle down. Gulping down great watery breaths, she seemed for an instance to look back at the five people on the beach, as if to thank them: this ancient princess, carried gallantly by humans back to her deep domain, finally understood the help they had given her.

For further information:

Dr Ijaz Ahmed
WWF - Pakistan, Karachi
Tel: 00 92 21 4544791-92
Fax: 00 92 21 4544790
wwfkhi@khi.compol.com