Saturday, July 10, 2010

Sunday's best

Jeff Klinkenberg of the St. Petersburg Times has written a remarkable story for Sunday's paper about the beautiful and resilient sea turtle.
MELBOURNE BEACH-She crawls out of the ocean in the dark, stopping, starting, stopping and then crawling again up the sand, raising her head, sniffing the air, then plowing ahead toward the dunes.
[...]
Sea turtles have been laying eggs on the world's beaches for at least 200 million years. They have been laying eggs on Florida beaches since the land emerged from the sea 25 million years ago. In the 21st century the turtles are still hanging on.

It must be so hard now. They drown by the thousands in shrimp trawls and at the end of commercial fishing long lines. Their nesting beaches are mostly developed. The seas in which they spend their lives are filled with sewage, plastic and now, in the Gulf of Mexico, oil gushing from the bottom a mile deep.

Yet here she comes. In the dark of a Florida night, she crawls out of the surf in Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge in east-central Florida. In the sea, she is streamlined and powerful. Out of the water, on the beach, she is awkward and fights gravity.

She catches her breath. Drags herself with those flippers another foot. The persistence and the courage of a sea turtle is enough to make a modern Floridian weep with joy.
Read the full story here.

2 comments:

  1. For someone so worried about media ethics, you certainly did grab a lot of that article.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the mini-lecture on ethics my moronic friend at Wyndham Hotel & Resort Palace Resort And Spa. Are you surfing on your time or company time?

    I'll give your anonymous comment a whole lot of considerstion....there, I'm done.

    You conveniently neglected to mention in your asinine comment that I provided two links to the article.

    Thanks for stopping by and spending almost an hour here!

    ReplyDelete

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