Meet Turtle Joe

At 7:30 on a recent Saturday morning, Joe Widlansky is driving his “turtle truck,” a white, five-speed Toyota Tacoma along the waterline on St. Pete Beach, Fla. He's been driving for an hour with no luck.

“Come on, turtles," he says.

Widlansky, 49, hits the brakes as he approaches four stakes with orange tape circling them that protect a mound of sand with an orange flag in the middle; it was one of the nests he found earlier this summer.

"Hello, nest!"

Every summer dozens of sea turtles crawl onto the Gulf Coast beaches near St. Petersburg to lay their eggs. Three of the seven species of sea turtles found worldwide – all of which are endangered or threatened – commonly nest on Florida's Gulf Coast. Biologists and volunteers who patrol the beach for nests usually find more than 100 nests every season, from St. Pete Beach to Clearwater alone. But last year, they found only 38 – a record low.

Widlansky, a sea turtle biologist at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, doesn't know why last year's count was so low.

"We don't know if it's just a fluke," he says.

Few people understand St. Pete’s sea turtles better than Widlansky. Five days a week he rises at 5 a.m. to look for turtle tracks leading to nests. His patrol area spans 26 miles of beach. They call him Turtle Joe.

Widlansky remembers his trips to the woods and swamps in his Connecticut hometown. All he could think of were the turtles out there, waiting to be discovered. He was 8 at the time.

"From the first time my mother would let me play in the swamps, I would bring turtles home," he says.

"Every time I found one, I just thought it was really neat."

Despite that childhood passion, it would be years before he found his way back to hunting for turtles. He spent 23 years repairing jet engines for Pratt and Whitney Aircraft in Middletown, Conn., until 2000, when his company downsized and he took a buyout.

"Repairing jet engines was good money,” he says, “but it doesn't satisfy your soul.”

He and his wife had always wanted to live in Florida, so they moved. Now they live in a “turtle house,” filled with pictures, paintings and statues of sea turtles. A wooden plaque on a wall reads: “Welcome to my nest.” There are turtle key chains, a turtle bottle opener, turtle key hooks, turtle candles and candleholders, turtle oven mitts, turtle pot holders and a turtle rug on the floor.

Widlansky went back to school at St. Petersburg College to study biology and began interning at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, working with sea turtles. Now, as a full-time employee, he spends his mornings scouting for turtle nests, and his afternoons caring for injured sea turtles at the aquarium. The aquarium currently has 21 turtles in rehab. A few of them will be there permanently because of injuries that left them blind or paralyzed.

"Sea turtles are my kids in a way," he says. "It gets to the human part of you – the nurturing part. Helping a poor, defenseless, sick sea turtle and releasing it out into the world, it's the greatest feeling ever."

Widlansky walks along the beach and stops when he sees flies circling empty Dasani and Powerade bottles with napkins strewn around them. He shakes his head.

"See, this is the stuff I hate," he says. "I don't understand why people have to litter my beaches."

Sea turtles die for lots of reasons, but most of them involve humans. They get hit by boats, caught by fishing hooks or have their nests stolen before their eggs hatch. Occasionally a shark attacks a turtle. Turtles are also killed by litter.

"People throw plastic things in the water and the turtles think it's food and they ingest it and die,” Widlansky says. "If sea turtles aren't doing well, it says we're not taking care of the Earth as good as we should be.”

Sea turtles have been endangered since the establishment of the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973. Populations of green and leatherback turtles, though considerably smaller, are rising gradually. But loggerhead turtle nest counts have decreased 50 percent since 1998, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. As many as 90 percent of loggerhead turtles make their nests on Florida's beaches.

“There are some worrisome issues right now,” says David Godfrey, executive director of the Caribbean Conservation & Sea Turtle Survival League, the world’s oldest sea turtle protection organization. He has some theories about why last year’s count was so low.

“We are pretty sure it’s probably related to what they call accidental capture in commercial fishing operations,” Godfrey says. Fishermen who use lines that go for miles or shrimp trawlers who put their nets out sometimes accidentally hook sea turtles. “We also see a lot of development on nesting beaches, so that’s played a role as well.”

When turtles hatch, they follow the moonlight from their nests back to the sea, where hatchlings can become prey to natural predators, like sharks. But with more development and lights on at night, sometimes the turtles go toward buildings instead of the water and get hit by cars.

A couple hours into his morning patrol, Widlansky is back in his truck. So far, he’s found two nests.

He brakes suddenly.

"Turtle tracks!” he says. “Good gravy. Holy moly. They're everywheres! There's 60!”

Widlansky hops out of his truck and begins drawing the tracks in a notebook. He marks the nest with wooden stakes, orange tape and a sign that reads “SEA TURTLE NEST.” It is the 60th nest he’s found this summer.

A few minutes later and a little farther up the beach, Karen Schanzly, an aquarium intern, finds another nest. After marking it, the two of them return to Nest 58 – which Widlansky found earlier that morning – and begin to dig. He worries that the nest is too close to the waterline.

Widlansky and Schanzly push their hands carefully into the sand, feeling for the leathery shell of the eggs. The eggs usually lie several inches beneath the sand. Softer sand indicates that the mother turtle had been digging in the area.

A crowd of swimmers and beach walkers gather.

“Hup!” Widlansky says. “Got it!”

As he dusts off the last bit of sand around the eggs, he bows to his audience.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Schanzly fills the bottom of a cooler with sand. She slowly pulls the eggs out of the nest, one by one, and places them in the cooler. Widlansky walks down the beach and begins digging a new hole for the eggs.

There are 121 of them.

“It’s just, it’s just like a miracle,” says Sally Dozier, one of the bystanders. “They look like little ping pong balls.”

Others ask questions – always the same questions. Widlansky answers them all.

When were the eggs laid? Last night. How many are in there? Usually between 100 and 150. When are they going to hatch? In 50 to 55 days. What happens when they hatch?

“We make sure they get to the water,” Widlansky says. “Then they’re on their own.

“It’s like they’re going off to college.”

Later, back at the aquarium, two volunteers and two interns stand at Widlansky’s office door, in the basement of the aquarium. They make small talk about turtles. Then Widlansky walks in.

“We found four nests this morning on the beach,” he crows. As of July 3, 2008, Widlansky and his colleagues have found 64 nests.

A volunteer brings in Teddy, a sick 2-year old loggerhead no bigger than the size of a letter-sized paper. Widlansky pulls on blue plastic gloves and feeds Teddy medicine through a syringe, then hands him back to a volunteer, who wraps the turtle in towels and places him in a transportation tub used to move the turtles around.

More updates from an intern to Widlansky: Tatum wouldn’t eat. Bruno ate squid.

For all Widlansky knows about sea turtles, lots of uncertainty remains. No one knows the exact population. The only way to estimate is by the number of nests made each year. Even then, it’s hard to tell how many of the hatchlings survive once they hit the water.

When a turtle is spotted on land, it usually means it has died and washed up to the shore. Widlansky is frustrated not knowing what kills most turtles. Unless there are boat marks or shark bites, it’s impossible to tell.

“I just can’t figure out those turtles, I tell ya,” he says. “After all these years.”

Every day, Widlansky grapples with the fact that he can’t control what happens to the turtles.

“I understand that’s nature: some have to die so others can live,” he says. “And there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s why they have a lot of babies, 'cause they know a lot of them don’t survive.”

For now, he’s doing all he can to make sure the baby sea turtles and the ones in rehab have a fighting chance. One question never seems to leave his mind: “For all the good that we do, is it really going to help turtles in the long run?

“Or are we just delaying their extinction?”