WELLFLEET, Mass. — December 12, 2014 — For as long as anyone knows, young sea turtles have ventured up the East Coast, leaving warm seas to feed on crabs and other prey. And some of them have lingered too long in northern waters and been stunned when the season turns cold.
Around this time of year, volunteers regularly patrol the beaches of Cape Cod Bay to rescue turtles that wash up at high tide — six of seven species of sea turtles are endangered — so they can be rehabilitated and relocated to warmer shores in the South.
But this year the usual trickle of stranded turtles has turned into a flood, and nobody seems to know why.
Since mid-November, volunteers on turtle patrol have found nearly 1,200, almost all young Kemp’s ridley turtles, the most endangered of turtle species. That is almost three times as many as in the previous record year, and many more times the number in an average year. More turtles are being found every day.
Most of them have survived, but hundreds have not.
The stranded turtles, typically 2 to 3 years old and each of them between the size of a dinner plate and a serving platter, have stretched the abilities of the veterinarians and volunteers who rescued them, and the capacities of aquariums as far away as Texas to care for the survivors until they can be released.
Bob Prescott, the director of the Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, who has been saving turtles for 32 years, said he had never seen anything like it. When he started walking the beaches, he said, he would find one or two turtles a season, warm them up and drive them to the Boston airport himself. “I would go to Logan and give turtles to the pilot of an Eastern Airlines jet,” he said. The pilot would keep the turtle in the cockpit and hand it off to a turtle expert in Florida.
Not this year. “One day, 157 came in,” he said.
The sanctuary now has about 150 volunteers to walk the beaches, help warm the turtles and drive them to the New England Aquarium hospital in Quincy for further care. The volunteers, using their own cars and vans, put the turtles in empty cardboard banana cartons lined with donated bath towels of every color.
Volunteers “hit every supermarket on the Cape” to get the banana boxes, Mr. Prescott said.
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