Pender County, N.C., is the proud home of a nationally acclaimed turtle hospital known as the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center.
(A growing number of turtle patients are admitted because they attempted to eat plastic materials that were discarded in coastal waters by humans.)
.jpg)
Hudson added: “The
turtles are here because something good happened to them.” They were rescued by
good people with a heart. The turtles are fortunate to receive tender care from
passionate volunteers who nurse the turtles back to health.
Turtle hospital founder Jean Beasley is a national hero. She retired in 2021 at age 86. It’s a great story, and Jean wrote it for Guideposts magazine in 2007.
Chapter One:
“My brother, Richard, saw it first. ‘Jean!’ he shouted, running up toward our little vacation beach house. ‘There’s something huge coming out of the ocean!’ The moon wasn’t quite full that summer night on Topsail Island back in 1970. But it was pretty close.”
“My husband, Fred, and I had fallen in love with the beaches of Topsail Island…on our honeymoon,” Jean wrote. “We’d vacationed there ever since and had recently bought this beach house. I squinted (and saw) an animal the size of a truck engine…making its way up the beach, right for our house.”
“It was past midnight, but I ran inside and woke up the kids.”
“‘What is it, Mom?’ Karen asked. Eight that summer, she was my youngest and every bit the nature lover I’d been at that age.”
“‘It’s a turtle,’ I said. ‘A sea turtle.’ Sea turtles were a threatened species. The females lumbered ashore to lay their eggs.”
“She came to a halt right at our porch steps and began digging with her back flippers. Sand flew through the air, smacking against the porch.”
Jean and Karen Beasley sat quietly wrapped in blankets to observe the entire process that lasted until 2 a.m., “when the turtle finally finished her task and crawled back into the thundering waves.”
That event began a quest. The mother-daughter team read everything they could about “their turtle.”
“Sea turtles live their entire lives in the ocean, except for when the females, traveling hundreds, or even thousands of miles, somehow return to the exact beaches where they hatched decades earlier to lay eggs of their own,” Jean said.
The hatchlings face an “against all odds” survival challenge – perhaps “just one turtle in 10,000 makes it to adulthood.”
“Summer by summer, we learned more about the turtles – and about how to help them,” Jean said. “We swept over the trenches left by mothers so their nests would be undisturbed. When hatching time came, we dug roads in the sand that the babies could follow down to the surf.”
“Sometimes we found stragglers from a nighttime hatching. We’d put them into the water and say a prayer for them as they paddled their way out toward deeper water,” Jean wrote.
“Word spread about this strange mother-daughter turtle-finding team. We got calls about injured turtles that washed up on Topsail Island’s 26 miles of beach.”
Chapter Two:
Jean and Fred Beasley officially transitioned in 1990 from seasonal to permanent residents of Topsail Island. That meant Jean could devote more time to her growing fascination with sea turtles.
Their daughter, Karen,
29, a graduate of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem had recently taken a
position with a Charlotte-based public relations firm.
.jpg)
“But then something terrible happened,” Jean wrote. “Like so many terrible things, it started out small...just a nagging cough. Karen saw our family doctor. She had leukemia.”
“Karen gave up her job and moved into the beach house with Fred and me.”
“It was the height of the nesting season. Mother turtles were laying eggs up and down the beach. ‘That’s the third call we’ve gotten this morning about the same turtle nest,’ Karen said one morning, exasperated. ‘Mom, we need to get this thing more organized.’”
That was the day that the
“thing” – the Topsail Island Turtle Project – was officially born.
“Karen lectured at schools and libraries, explaining the vital role that sea turtles play in the ocean’s ecosystem. Turtles are a bellwether species. Their disappearance means more than just no more turtles. It means our oceans are dying.”
“‘How,’ Karen asked, ‘could we sit back and let these animals slip into nonexistence before our eyes?’”
“Extinction is a full stop,” Jean said. “There’s no coming back. It’s permanent, irreversible. It takes courage to imagine something that large – that terrible. But Karen had that courage. She knew what it meant to face up to endings, even if I was still struggling to accept her worsening illness.”
“‘Mom,’ she said to me one day…‘I don’t want my illness to be the center of my life. I want the turtles to be the center of it. If I don’t make it, I want you to use (my life insurance) money for them.’”
“‘Okay, Karen,’ I said. ‘I promise.’”
Shortly after that conversation, late one evening, the mother-daughter turtle team was alerted that a jumbo-sized female had come ashore just a few miles down the beach from their cottage.
“Nesting can be the most dangerous moment in a mama turtle’s life,” Jean said. “It was 2 a.m. before the turtle had laid the last of her eggs and slipped back into the sea. Karen went home and slept in. The next day, she felt too ill to go out. ‘No, God, no,’ I prayed. ‘I’m not ready to lose Karen.’”
“Two days later, Karen slipped away peacefully, just a few months before her 30th birthday,” Jean wrote.
“I plunged into helping the turtles with more energy than ever….Karen was gone – at least from Earth. But her work on behalf of the earthly creatures she cared for most went on.”
Jean’s “turtle involvement” evolved into helping injured turtles recuperate.
One of the first “patients” of the Topsail Island Turtle Project in 1995 was a 40-pound juvenile loggerhead that had washed ashore with severe gashes, likely caused by a boat propeller. Jean named it “Lucky.”
Dr. Greg Lewbart,
professor of aquatic, wildlife and zoological medicine at North Carolina State
University, was summoned by the Jean and the project team. Dr. Lewbart put
“Lucky” back together.
.jpg)
“Lucky” underwent an 18-month “rehabilitation assignment,” living within a surplus “turtle tank” that was handed down by the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores.
“I had seen plenty of turtles by then, but…‘Lucky’ was the first Topsail sea turtle I really got to know personally,” Jean wrote. “There’s something uniquely painful and uniquely rewarding about taking in a wild creature, caring for it, coming to know it as an individual and setting it free again.”
Some volunteers carried
the turtle down to the sea. “So long, ‘Lucky,’” Jean said. He or she slowly
flapped out to sea. “May the Lord watch over you.”
.JPG)
“You put so much love and worry into the animal...and then you place it right back in harm’s way,” Jean said.
Chapter Three:
“After ‘Lucky’ left us,” Jean said, “I couldn’t get Karen’s words out of my mind: ‘Help the turtles.’ To really help them I needed – the turtles needed – a turtle hospital.”
“The Karen Beasley Sea
Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center opened its doors in the fall of 1997.”
.jpg)
Dr. Hans Westermeyer, a veterinary ophthalmologist at the N.C. State College of Veterinary Medicine, Jean Beasley and Dr. Craig Harms, who is based at the N.C.State n Center for Marine Sciences and Technology (CMAST) in Morehead City.
Jean Beasley said the volunteer-run turtle hospital has rehabilitated and released a thousand or so rescued sea turtles “post-Lucky.” She said that some turtles stay “for just a few days. Others spend months, even years here.”
“But for all of these animals, there eventually comes a moment when I have to tell them goodbye. When I have to give them back to the ocean, and back to God.”
“It’s never easy. But there’s no time that I feel closer to God – or to Karen – than when I place one of these turtles in the waves and watch it swim off….”
In 2013, the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center moved into a new 13,000-square-foot facility in Surf City on the Pender County mainland. The well-equipped turtle hospital operates as a nonprofit organization.
The KBSTRRC, as the locals refer to it, exists to: “Conserve and protect all species of marine turtles, both in the water and on the beach; rescue, rehabilitate and release sick and injured sea turtles; inform and educate the public regarding the plight of all sea turtles and the threat of their extinction; and provide an experiential learning site for students of biology, wildlife conservation and/or veterinary medicine from around the world.”
Jean Beasley told Matt Born of the Wilmington StarNews that sea turtles “are very charismatic, they look you in the eye, they communicate with you in a subtle way….”
Carl Turnage is one the many volunteers who has been helping out at the center for several years. “Once you get in here, you’d run through a brick wall for these turtles,” he said.
“They all have different personalities, and when we do finally release them, tears are shed because we do get attached to them. To see them being released is a real joy.”
Chapter Four:
On “Turtle Release Day,”
a thousand people or more may show up on Topsail Island just to watch – and
cheer on – the turtles as they are discharged from the turtle hospital and
re-enter the Atlantic Ocean to begin their journey out to sea.
It can be quite an emotional experience for people of all ages, wrote Tift Merritt, a correspondent for Our State magazine. It’s especially tough on Jean Beasley.
“Each of the turtles takes a piece of me,” Jean said.
While the objective of the Beasley center is to help each patient admitted to the turtle hospital recover from its injuries and ailments, two turtles have taken on roles as “ambassadors” at the center. Both are incapable of surviving in the ocean.
“Snooki” is a female Loggerhead who was admitted in 2016 after being stranded along the beach in Avalon, N.J. Although she weighs about 310 pounds, she has “positive buoyancy syndrome” that prevents her from staying submerged. Because sea turtles need to feed and sleep on the bottom, she cannot be released.
“Snooki” is said to be a bit of an extrovert. When people tour the center, she specializes in antics that “attract a crowd.”
Visitors are also introduced to “Lennie,” a rare Kemp’s ridley that was found tangled in a fish net and rescued near Beaufort in 2006 by Leonard Goodwin of Carteret County. The female turtle suffered “blunt force trauma to the head,” which caused permanent blindness. “Lennie” weighs about 88 pounds.
Dr. Craig A. Harms checks
on “Snooki” and “Lennie” when he makes his rounds at the Karen Beasley Sea
Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center (KBSTRRC). He is the director of the
Marine Health Program at North Carolina State University’s Center for Marine
Sciences and Technology (CMAST) in Morehead City.
Dr. Harms has been caring for his patients at KBSTRRC since 2000. He also delivers veterinary services and support for the North Carolina Aquariums, marine mammal and sea turtle stranding networks, area research aquaculture facilities and the Morehead City/Beaufort area marine laboratories.
June 12, 2021, was “Jean Beasley Day” in Pender County, marking the official retirement of Jean Beasley as head of the KBSTRRC. The volunteers playfully dubbed it “Jean’s Release Day.”
Someone associated with
the center reported on the event for the Pender County government website. The
scribe wrote: “We were about to end the outdoor ceremony when, oops, Jean asked
if she could say a few words. Not that we forgot she was there, but she was
hidden behind the large stack of awards in front of her on the table!”
“Jean she said it’s always been and will continue to be about the turtles. She thanked us for making her and her daughter Karen’s dream of ‘doing something to help the turtles’ come true.”
At age 86, Jean Beasley said it was time to let someone else have a turn.
Kathy Zagzebski started
as the center’s new executive director in February 2022. She formerly served as
the head of the National Marine Life Center in Bourne, Mass., on Buzzards Bay,
the gateway to Cape Cod.
Zagzebski said “If you
save turtles, then you save the world for humans and animals alike. Turtles are
a keystone species.”
No comments:
Post a Comment