O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? by Greg Cook

Orton ‘Brother’ King has answered the call of the sea twice in his life, once as a fisherman and then again as the savoir of the endangered hawksbill turtle. A visit to his sanctuary on the island of Bequia is a unique and fascinating experience.

Orton was a fisherman, born and raised on the tiny island of Bequia in the Grenadines. He and his family, like many others in the Caribbean, had been in this line of work for generations, and Orton started fishing for his own livelihood immediately after finishing primary school. Along with fish, he occasionally caught hawksbill turtles, popular for their meat and eggs, but most highly prized for their shells, which were (and sadly are still today) fashioned into jewellery, hair combs and other trinkets, now produced solely for the tourist market.

Yet when fishing alone as a skin-diver, Orton always felt a huge affinity with the hawksbill turtle, and he began to think of them as his 'special creature', the private spectacle of their beauty, grace and innocence became something of a personal talisman. But during the 57 years he made his livelihood from the sea, Orton realised his sightings of these solitary creatures had become dramatically fewer and that the population must be in a dangerously steep decline.

However, this isn’t entirely why Orton suddenly decided to become the self-appointed guardian of these beautiful animals. The other half of the story of how ‘Brother’ King turned from poacher to marine gamekeeper has a more fantastic, almost biblical quality.
 
Nearly twelve years ago, a small fishing schooner was wrecked in a freak squall, sinking anonymously into the Caribbean Sea. All hands were lost – except one. Orton was the sole survivor. He was saved after having clung to a pine plank for days, while dolphins and hawksbill’s circled around him – keeping the sharks at bay.
From the moment his feet once again touched land, Orton pledged to devote himself to caring for and nurturing the creatures of the sea. Then one dark night, while he camped on a beach, a returning hawksbill female crawled right into his tent to lay her eggs beside his sleeping bag, and Orton realised that this special species was where he should focus his preservation efforts.

It's been an enormous job. Orton set up the Old Hegg Turtle Sanctuary on one of Bequai’s silent northern beaches in 1995, and since then he has worked tirelessly on behalf of hawksbills, seven days a week; 12 hours a day. This time is spent monitoring beaches, checking nests, collecting vulnerable hatchlings and engaging in the ceaseless battle to protect the eggs of the mother turtles from poachers. Currently, there are 150 turtles housed at his sanctuary, ranging from the ages of 6 months to 2 years and 10 months. It takes 25 years before hawksbill turtles, both male and female, are able to breed. They only lay every three years.

Orton keeps the hatchlings in seawater ponds, where they are fed canned tuna for the first six months; they then progress onto small fish, such as sardines, until they reach 3 years. At this point in their development, the hawksbills are about 14 inches long, and this is when they are released back into the wild. Having reached this size means the turtles now stand a 50 percent chance of surviving in their natural habitat – compared to the one hatchling in every thousand that makes it in nature.

The life span of a hawksbill, if allowed the privilege, can be as much as 200 years, they can grow as large as four feet wide and weigh up to 200 pounds. Like salmon, hawksbills imprint, which means that they come back at every breeding cycle to lay their eggs on the same beach where they were born, making them particularly easy prey.

However, one particular turtle at the Old Hegg sanctuary appears to have ‘imprinted’ a little more than most. The 10-year-old female named Busybody, for reasons that are apparent upon visiting, now has her own private tank, and though Orton frequently takes her out for a swim in the sea, she seems to be perfectly happy just where she is.     

Of the seven marine turtle species in the planet’s oceans, three are endangered (the hawksbill is one) and a further three are critically endangered. To date, Orton has released over 800 hawksbill turtles back into the wild, and this amazing species has gained a true friend in a native who understands their plight. However, with a report from the World Wildlife Fund claiming that coastal communities around the world are losing millions of dollars in ecotourism a year through the destruction of rare sea turtles (worth over three times more in revenue alive rather than dead), it may just be that every islander in the Grenadine chain, and beyond, will eventually benefit from the tireless efforts of the remarkable Brother King.