Mon Repos Turtle Rookery

Just half an hour before midnight, a group of eight bodies wait silently in a half circle on Mon Repos Beach, Queensland, their backs to the crumbled dunes.  Most stand, some crouch, their heads are all tilted down towards the ground.  A full moon hangs over the ocean, hurling their shadows across the silver sand and frosting the tops of the waves with icy blue sparks.  The crashing of the surf and the chatter of a distant kookaburra are the only sounds to be heard.  Through a cloudless sky, a hundred billion stars sprinkle their ancient light over the scene.  Just a few hours ago, a loud gaggle of tourists stomped their way up and down this same beach, a one hundred strong gang of camera wielding fiends in search of nothing more than a photo to post straight to Facebook.  They soon gave up and headed back to the car park, leaving just this tiny group who now stand in awe at a sight which has been occurring on this spot for hundreds of thousands of years.

In the small circle of sand at their feet, the faintest hint of movement causes them all to look up at one another in excitement.  The movement creeps into a ripple, then to a wave of motion, then into several waves before the sand starts to boil and bubble.  To the sound of restrained yelps of glee from the onlookers, several tiny black specks appear.  With the sand dancing and spluttering like liquid, flicking in all directions, the fins of almost one hundred baby turtles pull their minute bodies to the surface.  They pour from the sand, like alien life forms, escaping from the sandy nest dug by their mother two months ago.  A young couple, stood a subtle distance from the rest of the group, wrap their arms tightly around eachother.  The delicate light of the moon reveals wide smiles on their faces.  The turtles, pulled by an invisible force, flow straight towards the sea, their flippers twirling like clockwork toys.  In a long dark stream, rolling into the darkness and edged by their tiny shadows, they cross the wide expanse of sand.  When the last hatchling emerges from the nest, the group follow it slowly and quietly, down the gentle slope of the beach, across the shells and driftwood and onto the moist sand.  A thin layer of the pulsing tide slides in and lifts this ten minute old creature from the earth.  His flippers begin to swim and he is carried off, out, and into the humbling enormity of the ocean.