From Monaco to Senegal, 46 endangered turtles reconnect with the land of Africa
Carefully extracted from the plywood boxes in which they have traveled since Saturday, first by road and then by air, the 46 turtles, as if groggy, took a few minutes on Tuesday to poke their heads out of their hand-sized shells.
Then they put one paw hesitantly in front of the other on the sandy and hot ground of the Turtle Village of Noflaye, a locality 35 km from the Senegalese capital.
The shock is gross. Just last week, they were living on Turtle Island, a space set up on the panoramic terrace of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. They were born there, eight years ago for the oldest, a trifle when you can reach more than a hundred years and about as many kilos.
In Noflaye, to maintain their rank as the third largest land tortoise after those of the Galapagos and the Seychelles, they will have to begin to recover their instincts, seek to eat by themselves, no longer lettuce, but plants, even carrion, and make their burrow.
So many superfluous activities in Monaco but vital for their ancestors, explains Olivier Brunel, aquarium manager at the Oceanographic Museum.
Their parents remained in Monaco, six individuals of the Centrochelys sulcata species, offered in 2011 to Prince Albert II by President Amadou Toumani Touré during a visit to Mali, the Sahelian neighbor of Senegal.
Associated with the African Institute for the Study and Protection of Turtles (ACI), the Monegasque Oceanographic Institute has appointed to the 46 “juveniles” the mission of participating in the strengthening of populations of spurred turtles, so called because of the folds of their shell.
The spurred tortoise, endemic to the Sahel, an immense semi-arid sub-Saharan band crossing Africa from east to west, is an endangered species. There are “at most” 150 individuals left in the wild in Senegal, explains Tomas Diagne, director of the ACI.
It is a victim of its predators, hyenas or jackals, but also of the destruction of its habitat by overgrazing and international traffic. Too often she ends up as a pet.
– Aerial interlude –
“If nothing is done urgently and constructively, in the next thirty years, the species will disappear in the wild in Senegal. It only exists in houses, in private farms”, worries M Diagne, also president of the scientific committee of the Village of the turtles, a center of study, preservation and education where the 46 new places will spend their first months.
In general, it is for all African and Senegalese turtles, land or sea, that the situation is “not good”, he judges in the shade of the acacias and baobabs of the Turtle Village .
“If I were a turtle, I wouldn’t ask to live or be born in West Africa, or just in Africa,” he admits.
Yet this is the reality that the 46 pioneers will face. Their journey, governed by the controls and authorizations linked to their status as a protected species, will have been an interlude between two lives, spent in the individual compartments of six wooden boxes perforated with holes and decorated with stencils by the children of Prince Albert. II and Princess Charlene of Monaco.
Carefully loaded at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle among the other goods on an Air France Paris-Dakar commercial flight, they traveled in the hold heated to 23 degrees, details captain François Chavarin.
In Noflaye, they were placed in a quarantine enclosure. There, they will begin to “relearn the BABA of wildlife” for a few months, underlines Mr. Diagne.
Then, they will be removed to a reserve in the northwest, as close as possible to the Sahel, in a so-called stabilization enclosure first, for their protection. Then the enclosure will be cut down.
A model to follow, according to Tomas Diagne.
“These are turtles born in Monaco, from parents in Africa, (they) were able to join their land, the land of their ancestors. African fauna leaves all the time, it is exported all the time (…) It’s very rare that she comes back.”