Turtle conservation travel guide

These days, “connecting” can be all about being online, checking social media and uploading beautifully filtered photos. But as a turtle volunteer, Wi-Fi may be limited and flash photography is banned on night patrols. Instead, your connections will be with nature, spending days (and nights) on the sand and in the sea. You’ll also connect with local communities, tourists and like-minded volunteers.

Volunteers might have visions of themselves standing guard over nesting mothers and vulnerable hatchlings. But often, the most valuable volunteer work can be in education: teaching children about ecosystems and turtles, helping communities find alternative incomes to selling meat and eggs, explaining that eggs are not aphrodisiacs despite persisting beliefs. It might not be as Instagrammable – but it’s a long-term and effective solution, and it really works.

Some people are put off volunteering projects because they can be quite expensive. After all, you’re volunteering your time and effort, so why should you have to pay for the pleasure? The answer is that these are often permanent projects that need funds from paying volunteers so they can continue to operate. There’s a cost involved with every volunteer too, from training time to equipment. The best things in life aren’t always free.

Working on beaches, you might think that the only footwear worth packing is flip-flops. But don’t underestimate how far you will be walking on night patrols. Getting to the end of a 5km beach and back is 10km, and with a few detours added in the distances soon start to add up, so make sure your feet are comfy. Long sleeves and trousers are also handy; you may not be cold, but mosquitoes are extra thirsty after dusk.

You can volunteer with sea turtles in several places along the beautiful Pacific Coast, so you can choose the style of trip that suits you – whether that’s remote and rustic or more community-focused. Alternatively, join a local scientist for a week-long “expedition” monitoring leatherbacks on isolated black-sand beaches.

Helping out on a sea turtle conservation project is one of the best family volunteering placements out there. Many nesting seasons coincide with school vacations, the work is safe and easy to learn, and to top it off, you’ll be living by a beach. You may even find you’ve created a new generation of marine conservationists, scientists or activists, with lessons learned on the sand sure to stick for life.

The island of Kefalonia was an idyll long before Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was published. For the endangered loggerhead sea turtles that nest on its beaches, however, it’s not so great. They continue to face numerous threats here, but determined volunteer projects are having an impact, and every year thousands of hatchlings make it down to the water’s edge and, perhaps, a future.

Helping to clean up beaches is all the rage right now and sadly it’s likely to be necessary for many years to come. Plastic waste is a major threat to turtles and other wildlife but, if we want to really make a difference to beaches, we need to stop it getting into seas and oceans in the first place. Look out for volunteer projects near you that work on cleaning rivers, as this can have a massive impact.

Richly coloured, exquisitely patterned and gently translucent – tortoiseshell has captivated craftspeople and aesthetes for centuries. But its origins are less beautiful: it comes from the shells of endangered sea turtles, mainly the hawksbill. Despite a ban on the tortoiseshell trade, there is a thriving black market, particularly in the Far East, and many turtles are killed each year for their shells, which sell for hundreds of pounds – or more.

Hatcheries should only ever be used as a last resort – and even then, only in conjunction with other conservation initiatives. But one thing a hatchery should never do is use tanks to keep hatchlings. They can spread diseases and bacteria, encourage deformities, and are often really used to benefit tourists, not turtles. Read more about why we don’t promote tanks.

We all love waking up right on the beach or falling asleep to the sound of the waves. But if these are beaches where turtles nest, this can be disastrous. Mothers can become distressed by noise and release their eggs at sea, while hatchlings, disorientated by artificial lights, may never find their way into the water. Do your research about how sensible these accommodations are – read more on our responsible tourism page.

Breeding endangered species in captivity may seem like a good idea – but in practise, it rarely results in reintroduction to the wild, and when it does, there can be issues with genetic stock and interbreeding. In reality, many facilities are just glorified zoos. The worst case is that they are farms which make money from visitors, from selling the turtles on to aquariums, and – less often nowadays, thankfully – from selling turtle meat.

These projects don’t just work try and mitigate the decline in sea turtle populations – many also work to prevent the root causes, and there are many. Changing fishing practices, dispelling the myth that turtle eggs are an aphrodisiac, helping poachers benefit from tourism so that they are not as tempted to sell valuable turtle shells, and raising awareness of the turtles’ vulnerability to discourage coastal communities from harvesting them for their eggs and meat are all essential if the turtles are to survive long term.

Many sea turtle conservation projects work closely with local communities, run after-school workshops and train local people to be rangers and conservationists themselves, creating a cycle that benefits communities, turtles, habitats and tourists. In locations where these types of initiatives have been running for several years, increases in turtle numbers have already been observed.

“You get people that expect luxury, people that aren’t prepared to just get involved with the community and the way of life there,” says Anne Smellie, from our leading turtle conservation partner Oyster Worldwide, about volunteering in Costa Rica.

“As a volunteer in Costa Rica you are living amongst local people; that’s part of the amazing experience. You should be prepared to have less access to Wi-Fi and to sleep in a room with a fan rather than air con, share a bedroom, and eat quite simple meals every day because that’s often what locals do! There is some variation – projects do try very hard to accommodate – but people with big expectations shouldn’t necessarily do this sort of thing because it is so different. You are immersing yourself into a new country, culture and all that sort of thing. If you expect luxury then it makes it very difficult for you to settle in.”