IT WAS an early morning sight that left one walker angry.
A Hawksbill turtle – one of those critically endangered species – brutally hacked to death and then left on Accra Beach, Christ Church.
What has made it worse, said the field director of the Barbados Sea Turtle Project (BSTP), Darren Browne, is the apparent senselessness of the killing.
The gruesome discovery greeted walkers who were taking their morning strolls along the Boardwalk. One woman said it appeared as if the perpetrator had used a knife to slash the turtle and had then dragged it up the beach.
“I couldn’t look at her. I am so incensed,” she said.
One of the volunteers said the turtle was stabbed multiple times with a knife and a broken bottle.
Browne said the person attacked the turtle without any reason.
He explained some turtles are killed for their meat but this turtle was just killed for the sake of killing. “They wounded it around its head and neck and it bleed out,” he said.
“This literally seems like a malicious act because they did not take the meat or the eggs. It strikes me as someone being very cruel,” Browne told the WEEKEND NATION. The Hawksbill was killed before she was able to nest.
He described the butchered Hawksbill as being approximately 27 years old -relatively young as turtles can live to be 80 years – and said this was probably the female’s first time nesting. It was tagged in 2009.
Browne added that this was not the first time volunteers from the Sea Turtle Project had been called to such a find.
Last August, they found a turtle whose flippers had been cut off.
That, said Browne, was just one of “quite a few” incidents.
This year, there were two attempts at poaching, but volunteers were able to respond in time and flip the turtles back over. There were also two acts of poaching, where concerned people reported the turtles were being carried off.
“There was another one where all we found was a head,” he said.
This latest matter has been reported to police but Browne does not hold out much hope of anyone being charged unless there were eyewitnesses to the event.
Only one in 1 000 hatchlings survive to adulthood.
