Last winter, more than 1,000 loggerhead turtles floated listlessly in Cape Cod Bay, stunned into torpor by the winter cold. Barely able to move, their hearts struggled to pump blood through their freezing bodies.
Rescuers had come to expect this; each year, hundreds of turtles are trapped in the bay before they can migrate to warmer waters — but never this many.
“This year [our plans] went out the window,” says Kate Sampson, Sea Turtle Stranding and Disentanglement coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The numbers of stranded sea turtles were so high that everybody on the ground was completely overwhelmed. Our previous busiest year was in 2012, and that was only 400 turtles; this year, we had three times as many.”
The clock was ticking. Without treatment, these endangered animals would succumb to pneumonia, heart failure or shock. Local rescue centers could take only around 100 turtles; to save the rest, Sampson had to coordinate transport to rescue centers across the nation.
Working with partners at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, Sampson contacted Leslie Weinstein, owner of the aviation company True-Lock. Weinstein had been rescuing sea turtles since he was a boy living in St. Augustine, and his company had given him deep connections within the aviation community.
“I told [Sampson] I’d get it done,” says Weinstein. “She didn’t believe me. What you have to understand is that pilots and turtles are both an endangered species; it makes all the sense in the world for one to help the other.”
With Weinstein on the job, calls came pouring in from private pilots nationwide, volunteering to help rescue the turtles. Nestled in banana boxes, the animals were taken to treatment centers as far away as Florida. In total, 552 turtles were saved thanks to the help of Weinstein and his pilots. The rest of the 1,200 turtles were taken to treatment centers across the eastern seaboard.
Says Sampson, “I can’t imagine how we would have transported so many without the help of Leslie and those pilots.”