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2005
The first Turtle Day is celebrated in an elementary school in Mayumba. Irish filmmakers capture the event in a documentary. Winners of the art contest and their parents are taken on an overnight trip into the park to see nesting leatherback turtles.
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2006
Mayumba celebrates Turtle Day with a beach clean-up, football matches, and a talent competition. Nearly 300 students and their teachers participate in the fun-filled event!
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2008
Turtle Day goes nationwide, expanding to include events in Gamba and Libreville. Film festivals, parades, beach clean-ups, talent contests, and football matches raise awareness about sea turtle conservation with over 400 people!
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2009
Over 400 people celebrated Turtle Day, as we expanded to include a fourth site: Cap Esterias. Hundreds of students turned up in Mayumba to parade through the streets, chanting: "Protect Sea Turtles!", winners of our art contests got to adopt and name satellite-tagged turtles, and famous Gabonese singer Annie Flore added sparkle to our Libreville event.
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2010
We celebrated Turtle Day at 5 sites, adding Ndindi to the festivities. In all, over 1000 people participated! In Cap Esterias, national TV crews were on the scene to film the release of a rescued juvenile green turtle. Gamba organized a camping trip where students saw baby sea turtles and an elephant!
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2011
The party keeps growing! This year, we had over 2000 participants in five coastal towns! The tradition of clean-up campaigns and film festivals continued, and we added dance contests to the day’s fun events! Our new Libreville party location: Sablière beach, was a hit and saw nearly 1000 visitors!
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2012
With more than 2000 participants overall, Turtle Day continued its tradition in the coastal towns, and added an activity-filled tour to 5 villages on the lagoon near Mayumba National Park. We added carnival games and face painting, and gave out hundreds of turtle-themed prizes and T-shirts all over the coast. Special thanks to the OGAR Company for sponsoring several hundred t-shirts!
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2013
Altogether, over 1500 people, Gabonese and expatriate, young and old, came to attend the 2013 Turtle Day events. Thanks to generous grants from US Fish and Wildlife and Shell Gabon, the Partnership was able to provide many prizes to participants. Having witnessed the great excitement and joy on their faces, it is clear that this legacy is in good hands.
Turtle Day!
From humble roots at a single elementary school in Mayumba, Turtle Day has grown into a national event with hundreds of participants at ten coastal sites! There are a number of fun and educational activities that we undertake each year.
Carnival!
In 2012, we added carnival games and facepainting at our Libreville event, giving participants a chance to win prizes like sunglasses, baseball caps, keychains, t-shirts, posters, stickers, and re-useable shopping bags, all bearing messages of turtle conservation. We also painted over 200 faces in Cap Esterias! Due to its popularity, we plan to take this new activity to our other sites in future years.
Clean-up Campaigns
Each year, we conduct a town or beach clean-up at each site. Local children are issued plastic gloves and given a brief lesson on the difference between biodegradable and non-biodegradable litter.
It's quite impressive to see the difference a clean-up campaign makes, and it's rewarding for the children to experience the excitement of a concerted team effort for a good cause.
Football Tournaments
In Gabon, no game is bigger than "le foot-ball"! Even in the smallest village, you will find a handful of kids kicking a ball around, trying to score a goal between two bamboo posts. So naturally, every Turtle Day event must have a football match or tournament!
The girls play just as fiercely as the boys do- because they all know that a trophy and turtle t-shirts are at stake!
Dance Contests
Kids of all ages dance their little hearts out to the crowd's thundering applause, and the kid with the best turtle boogie takes home a poster, a t-shirt, and a trophy holding a shiny new change purse filled with a cash prize!
This year's dance contest at Sablière beach drew in hundreds of passers-by!
Art Contests
For those children who might be more inclined to express themselves with their pen and crayons than their fancy footwork, we also hold turtle-themed art contests. In years past, we have asked students to draw their visions of turtle tourism, natural predation and human threats, and to illustrate the turtle life-cycle.
Winners have received coloring books and crayons, t-shirts and trips to see nesting turtles, adoption certificates for satellite tagged turtles they had the honor of naming, and funding to reproduce their art as murals in their town.
Parades
Everyone loves a parade! And few things generate more excitement in a small Gabonese town than hundreds of students marching down Main Street as they hold a lifesize leatherback turtle model aloft, chanting "Protect Sea Turtles! Protect Sea Turtles!"
The enthusiasm is contagious, evidenced by the people who leave the shops and cafés to join in the fun! And each year, one lucky student wins the coveted privilege of wearing the turtle costume!
Turtle Film Festivals
The Gabon Sea Turtle Partnership has produced several in-house films over the past few years, and the Turtle Film Festivals give us a chance to show them to a large audience, informing them about how they can help protect sea turtles.
We have also made several films about our Turtle Day event. The kids really love spotting themselves, and their schoolmates, on the big screen!
Field Camp Visits
Field excursions can be an unforgettable experience for a young person. Imagine walking along the beach at night, feeling and smelling the softness of the night air, and finally, encountering an enormous nesting leatherback for the first time in your life! It's an experience that is such a rich feast for the senses that it can't possibly be replicated in the classroom. Besides... who knows which of these students will turn out to be one of tomorrow's turtle researchers?
Among the many activities we carry out during this annual fete, one of the most exciting so far was the 2010 release of a rescued juvenile green turtle that we named Aquarhum, after the Libreville nightclub that agreed to give it to us for release. The event was covered by national print and broadcast media, over 100 local schoolchildren were present with their teachers, and the National School of Water and Forests faculty were also represented.
Purchasing sea turtles to avoid their ending up in a cooking pot may seem like a good idea, but ultimately it encourages the hunters as it is providing a demand for their "product". And keeping a sea turtle, which has evolved to live in the high salinity of the ocean, in a chlorinated swimming pool or pond adds up to torture.
If you live in Libreville, voice your concern over this unsustainable practice, and encourage friends and businesses NOT to support turtle hunting. If you see a turtle kept in captivity in Gabon, let the proprietor know that it is a protected species, and therefore illegal to purchase, keep, or sell. If they refuse to release it, you can report the offender to the Ministry of Water and Forests.