For millennia, sea turtles have swum ashore every summer to lay their eggs on beaches in what is now southern Lebanon. After incubation, the hatching race across the sand from their nests to the sea at night. A chance encounter with a sea turtle one night in 1999 inspired Mona Khalil to create the conservation project at Mansouri and Kolaila that is unique in Lebanon. Mona, then living in the Netherlands, had returned to Lebanon to visit her family’s beachfront farm. One moonless night, she was amazed to spy a green turtle laying eggs on the beach – and when she discovered that turtles were in danger of vanishing from Lebanon, she immediately knew what she would do when she came back to live there. In 2000, just after Israel withdrew its troops from south Lebanon, Mona and her assistant Habiba began restoring the farmhouse, researching turtles and consulting experts on how they could protect them. This turned out to be labour-intensive – keeping the beach clean, daily monitoring to gather data during the nesting season from May to September, relocating nests higher up the beach if they were threatened by agriculture runoff or sea flooding and installing metal grids to protect them from predators. “We were spending a lot of money on the sea turtle project and no one was helping us, so we decided to rent out a room,” Mona recalls. That was the beginning of the Orange House bed-and-breakfast, an eco-tourism venture that helps fund the project. Apart from monitoring and protecting the turtles and their eggs, one aim of the project is to persuade the government to declare the beach at Mansouri and Kolaila a national nature reserve to protect it from the kind of unplanned and often illegal development that has driven turtles from all but a handful of beaches in Lebanon. The local municipalities have recognised Mansouri and Kolaila beach as a protected natural area, but legal action at government level is needed to ensure its long-term future. Read more about the Orange House Project here: orangehouseproject/ Erik
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 09:23:24 +0000
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