Gifts to the Earth | Earth's Birthday Project

Protect Sea Turtles

Playa Grande, Costa Rica

ALERT! Big Gift Helps Save Park
It is hard to believe, but President Oscar Arias, the Noble Peace Prize winner and advocate of “Peace with Nature,” has proposed to eliminate Las Baulas Park. Developers there have claimed that they had a deal with him when he got elected to kill the park. Now he has proposed to do just that.

Send a Letter of Protest on Behalf of Big Gift Students

There is still time to help! We are fighting with all our might to save the beach at Las Baulas for leatherback turtles. Donations to the Big Gift for turtles in 2009 and 2010 will protect mothers, eggs and hatchlings on the beach. In the meantime, the Leather Back Trust, our sea turtle conservation partner, is making a mighty effort to protect the beach.

Major environmental groups and conservation organizations have joined to protest destruction of the park. These include Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund. Many smaller environmental groups in Costa Rica and many ordinary people are also protesting.

About Playa Grande
For millions of years leatherback sea turtles have nested at Playa Grande, a broad sandy beach at Las Baulas Park on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Until recently, several thousand turtles came annually to mate in nearby waters. Every night from October to late February, giant females lumbered out of the sea and onto the beach to dig nests in the sand for their eggs. Weeks later, tens of thousands of hatchlings scrambled out of the nests and into the surf.

Today fewer than 180 leatherbacks nest at Playa Grande in any given year. The same is true at all leatherback beaches throughout their Pacific range. The drop in numbers of nesting females is due in part to deep-line and gillnet fishing off the Pacific Coast of the United States. These threats have been addressed by federal law prohibiting fishing at critical times of year, and adult turtles are safer today than they have been in decades.

Now the major threat to leatherbacks in the Pacific is loss of nesting beach and poaching of newly laid eggs. Unless poaching is controlled and nesting beaches are protected from unregulated development, leatherback sea turtles will be extinct in the Pacific Ocean.

We Can Help!
In 2010, every penny, nickel, dime, quarter and dollar raised for Big Gift: Sea Turtles will help protect nesting mothers, eggs, and hatchlings at Playa Grande. The no fund-raising way: join the protest by sending a letter to the legislative assembly of Costa Rica. Or trigger a donation from our conservation partners by supercharging science and math in your grade 7-9 classroom with EDSS: Sea Turtles, our 7-day mini-unit on sea turtles.

Big Gift Sea Turtles is a partnership between Earth’s Birthday Project, The Leatherback Trust and Conservation International.

Earth's Birthday Project | PO Box 1536 Santa Fe, NM 87504 | 505 986 6040 | 800 698 4438 | info@earthsbirthday.org

Earth’s Birthday Project educates children about the Earth—its beauty, resources and conservation.
Since 1989, more than 15 million children have participated in butterfly and other science activities
as well as in rainforest conservation through the Big Gift to the Earth.
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Protect Sea Turtles

Playa Grande, Costa Rica

Big Gift 4 Ways