Writing to Learn by William Zinsser

Author:William Zinsser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

I like the casual purity of that sentence. It says everything it needs to say, and the word “marvel” gives it emotional weight, telling us that something remarkable is going on here. I know management consultants who can’t talk about numbers without using the phrase “order of magnitude”; a six-pack of beer costs on an order of magnitude of five dollars.

When you think of the unpromising future that confronts a turtle egg and the turtle hatchling that comes out of it, you wonder why sea turtles don’t give up their stubborn, reckless old ways of leaving their new generation on shore, and instead carry one big, well-tended egg in a pouch or release myriads of turtle larvae to join the plankton, and swamp the laws of chance with millions of largely expendable progeny. The answer, of course, is that the turtles have hit on the formula for outwitting predators, or at least for surviving in spite of them. The formula is simply one hundred turtle eggs….

If you were able to get a complete list of the animals that prey on turtle eggs and young it would surely include most of the carnivores and omnivores, both vertebrate and invertebrate, that live near a turtle-nesting beach. The predators range in size from ants and crabs to bears. Some of them live along the beach itself, some in the coastal scrub. Some come from far back in the interior, showing up for the turtle season as the Siquirres dogs at Tortuguero used to do [Tortuguero is the site of Professor Carr’s camp] and as the Rancho Nuevo coyotes do to this day.

At Tortuguero nowadays the most important non-human predators on the beach are dogs and buzzards. The dogs are the worst. They move in on a laying female and take the eggs as they are laid or prevent her from covering them. They are stronger at digging than buzzards are, too, though buzzards dig better than many people might imagine. Most people, in fact, probably don’t imagine that buzzards dig at all. The other regular turtle eaters are opossums, the few domestic pigs that range the northernmost miles, and the ravening hosts of wari, or white-lipped peccaries, [which] sometimes travel out to the beach from the inland forest at nesting time and hatching time. This is of course a catastrophe, especially if it happens in early October when in hundreds of nests the little turtles rest in tight bundles in little cavities only an inch or less beneath the surface, waiting for the time that seems to them proper for bursting out into the unknown world. Wari are so devastating that when I am asked why the green turtle chooses Turtle Bogue to cling to, out of all the thousands of miles of Caribbean shore that look like good turtle beach, I think first of saying: because peccaries find it hard to get there across the lagoon….

When [the hatchlings] do come out they waste no time about it. Their trip across the sand to the surf is both fast and direct.

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