Project saves more than 22 thousand turtles and tortoises in AM – 12/13/2023 – Tourism

Paul Clark is a stubborn guy. Born in Scotland, he decided to move to Amazônia in the 1990s, shortly after finishing college. Not satisfied with moving to the forest, he also decided that he would change the forest with two tools: education and preservation.

In the first aspect, he created the VivAmazônia project, which taught hundreds of local children to become literate and taught them to pay attention to the place where they live from an early age. In the second, he targeted turtles and other local chelonians and created, in 2003, Bicho de Casco.

The idea was to protect the young and put an end to predatory fishing for these species of reptiles, inhibit trade and limit the consumption of animals — a local delicacy — to a few family occasions.
With the help of other volunteers and community leaders, Paul began collecting eggs from river beaches —chelonians bury their eggs under the sand—, protecting them until the chicks were born and then gaining strength, in five or six weeks, to manage to return to the river.

Since the beginning, more than 22 thousand animals have been relocated to their habitat, and more people have joined the idea: Ruy Tone, from Katerre, started to provide transport for the entire operation, in addition to participating in the training of volunteers, and ICMBio joined the rescue and care of animals, in addition to monitoring their release, in the Baixo Rio Branco and Jauaperi extractive reserve, created in 2018 in Amazonas and Roraima.

Today there are seven beaches monitored and six communities involved. The project pays volunteers for each turtle returned to the river.

“Throughout the region, throughout the Amazon, chelonian trafficking is a major concern. The illicit activity is visible,” says Leila Nápoles, manager of ICMBio in Jauaperi. “We found vessels with 200, 300. It’s a lot. And it seems like it will never end, but it does. That’s why we encourage management programs.”

Leila points out the difficulty in establishing the reserve’s deliberative council and designing the management plan as obstacles to the program, which supports sustainable activities.

Even so, progress is concrete. In the expedition that Sheet followed, there were seven releases in three days, with around 400 little animals in each of them. These are actions coordinated by people from the communities themselves, like Divina, who took on the mission in Samaúma (RR) and now teaches her daughters Letícia, 8, and Lília, 5, about the importance of conserving the place where they live.

Among the species rescued are the irapuca, the tracajá, the small iaçá, the Amazon turtle and the loggerhead, considered the most aggressive.