Tickled About Turtles

By Tim Padgett

Turtles, inert and uncuddly, lag behind whales and pandas in the race for wildlife-conservation publicity. So they're lucky to have Peter Pritchard as a cheerleader. Born in England and educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in zoology, Pritchard, 56, has done superb scientific research. But even more impressive is his campaign to make turtles as popular as Mickey Mouse. Appropriately, his new, privately funded Chelonian Research Institute, for the study and preservation of turtles, is located in Oviedo, Fla., just a half-hour drive from Disney World. Pritchard shares observations with celebrity tortoise lovers such as Queen Elizabeth II, helps South American Indians raise chickens so they won't hunt turtles, and writes children's books in addition to academic papers. "Turtles have big, gentle eyes and a slight smile on the face," he says. "This is a good critter."

The world's oldest surviving reptiles, turtles are also ecologically invaluable critters. That's why Pritchard's work to save them from extinction--and soup--is as serious as it is offbeat. Like alligators and other large burrowing animals, turtles are "eco-system architects," says Pritchard. "A turtle's burrow has got an incredible variety of things living in it."

Pritchard has done his most innovative work along the Atlantic coast in Guyana, a haven for sea turtles. By the 1960s, overhunting by local Arawak Indians--themselves an endangered group--had ravaged the turtle population. But Pritchard helped save both turtles and tribe: he has lobbied Guyana and private sources for grants that have weaned the Arawaks off turtle meat and into chicken farming. And he hires Arawaks to tag turtles for research and defend nesting grounds. The killing has largely stopped, he says, because turtle protection is now "a family discipline thing" among Arawaks, "rather than an outsider laying down the law."

Pritchard's conservation goals include coming up with the first reliable count of the number of female sea turtles still alive in the world. And then, of course, there's the unusual. The Guyana government is negotiating with a Texas firm to build a commercial space port to launch communications satellites near Pritchard's primitive Arawak camp. Pritchard in turn is urging the company to show its good intentions toward the local ecosytem by creating a wildlife sanctuary beside the launching pad. That might widen the turtles' smiles.

--By Tim Padgett. Reported by Brad Liston/Oviedo

With reporting by Brad Liston/Oviedo