Pit No. 30

Pit No. 30, dated 14 February 2026. A Forest Department mesh cage on Palolem Beach, a turtle nest inside, and a small calculation about what might already have happened by the time I found it.

I was walking along Palolem Beach one morning when I noticed something that didn’t quite fit the usual furniture of the beach. A small green mesh enclosure, staked into the sand with wooden posts. An official-looking label on the front.

Pit No. 30. Date: 14 February 2026. Forest Department, Wildlife and Eco-Tourism, South Goa Marine Range.

A sea turtle had come ashore during the night and laid her eggs just above the tideline.

The Forest Department had got there first, or shortly after. The mesh cage is standard practice along this stretch of coast: it marks the nest, keeps dogs and careless feet away, and lets the sand breathe while making the site visible to anyone who walks past. There was no guard. Just the cage, the label, and the assumption that people would understand what they were looking at.

The eggs stay buried for 45 to 60 days. Pit 30 was laid on 14 February, which meant that by the time I was standing there in late March, the hatchlings were either already gone or within days of emerging. I had no way of knowing which side of it I was on. The sand looked undisturbed, which could mean anything.

They emerge at night and head toward the brightest point on the horizon. For most of their existence this meant the moon on the water. On developed coastlines it can mean the lights from a beach shack, which is one of the less romantic ways a species can be steered off course. The fraction that make it to adulthood is small enough that every nest counts.

Palolem is a busy beach. Tourists, fishermen, beach shacks, boat trips. The turtles were here long before any of it, returning each season to the same stretch of sand where they were born. The Forest Department has been counting the nests long enough to give them numbers. Thirty, this season, on this beach alone.

I stood there for a while. Just the cage, the label, the number. It stayed with me longer than most of the things I did photograph that day.

The Olive Ridley Turtle

The turtles that nest at Palolem are Olive Ridley sea turtles, Lepidochelys olivacea, the smallest and most numerous of the seven sea turtle species. The name comes from the olive-grey colour of the shell, which reaches about 65 to 70 centimetres in length in an adult. They weigh around 35 to 45 kilograms.

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Their range covers the tropical and subtropical waters of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans. India is one of the most important nesting grounds in the world, with the beaches of Odisha on the east coast seeing mass nesting events, called arribadas, where thousands of females come ashore simultaneously. Goa’s beaches see individual nesting rather than mass events, but the South Goa coastline, from Palolem down to Galgibaga, is a consistent and documented nesting area. Galgibaga Beach, a few kilometres south of Palolem, has been declared a wildlife sanctuary specifically because of the turtles.

The nesting season in Goa runs from November to March. A female comes ashore at night, above the high tide line, digs a pit with her rear flippers, and lays between 100 and 150 eggs. She then covers the nest, returns to the sea, and plays no further role. She may nest two or three times in a single season, returning to the same beach, sometimes to within a few metres of the same spot, guided by a magnetic sense that researchers still do not fully understand. Males never return to land after the day they hatched.

Incubation takes 45 to 65 days depending on sand temperature. The sex of the hatchlings is determined by that temperature: warmer sand produces more females. As average temperatures rise, researchers have begun to find heavily female-skewed hatchling populations in some nesting areas, which is a problem the species cannot easily adapt to quickly enough.

The hatchlings emerge at night, break through the sand as a group, and orientate toward the brightest horizon. On an undeveloped beach this is the sea. On a beach lined with restaurants and accommodation, it requires some navigation on their part and some restraint on everyone else’s. Most hatchlings die before reaching adulthood. Estimates vary, but one in a thousand is sometimes cited. The ones that survive can live for 25 to 30 years.

The Olive Ridley is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. The main threats are bycatch in fishing nets, coastal development, light pollution, and plastic ingestion. In Goa the Forest Department runs a nest protection programme that has been running for several decades. Rangers patrol the beaches during nesting season, mark each nest, and in some cases relocate eggs laid in positions likely to flood. Pit 30 suggests a reasonable season by the time I was there in late March.

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