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Independence
Green Patina
Cast bronze sculpture of a newly hatched green sea turtle top
view
During the summer of 2008 I had an
opportunity to visit the country of Costa Rica with a group of
students/teachers through Miami University’s Green Teacher
Workshop. While
there we spent two nights at a location in the northeast of
the country called Tortuguero or “place of the turtles”.
One dark and stormy night, and it really was very dark
and very stormy, we lay
on the exposed beach of Tortuguero in a driving rain with bolt
after bolt of lightning and chest throbbing thunder playing
about us. It was on this beach, revealed in stark strobes of
light which alternately revealed the beach in stark detail and
an opaque blackness where we watched turtle after turtle come
ashore, struggle up the beach, dig a nest,
lay a clutch of eggs and return to the ocean.
These were green sea turtles, 22,500 of which will
repeat what I had witnessed each summer on this one beach, the
largest such nesting area on the planet.
Green sea turtles are one of several different species
of turtle that nest on this beach and one of only about
seven sea turtle
species in all the oceans.
The worlds other turtle species include the Hawksbill,
Olive Ridley, Kemp’s Ridley, Loggerhead, Flatback and
Leatherback.
It was this experience that inspired me to sculpt the
Hatchling, Independence, Green
and the mass hatching entitled March to the Sea.
See additional
description at
the bottom of the page
Green
is made from a combination of solid and hollow
cast bronze.
It weighs about 25 pounds including the stone base and is
12” x 12” x 12” in size.
It is a sculpture of a green sea turtle swimming
around a coral head in a warm tropical sea.
Green sea turtle may live for up to an estimated 60
years in the wild.
During their life they may wander far, from
Massachusetts to Brazil and from the Mediterranean Sea to
the coasts of North and South America.
Green Sea Turtles also can be found in the pacific
Ocean although they are much darker, so dark in fact that
some call them Black Turtles and classify them as a
separate species.
After hatching the little turtle leaves the beach
of it birth and heads out into the open sea.
It alternately swims and drifts with its goal of
getting as far from shore as possible.
Shore is where the majority of its swim or fly.
The little turtle will eventually find floating
clumps of algae (sea weed) and will spend the next few
years drifting and feeding on a combination of small
crustaceans, jellyfish, mollusks and algae.
After several years, now the size of a small dinner
plate, they move back into shallow coastal waters.
Here they now change their feeding habits, green
sea turtle feed as adults almost exclusively on algae and
turtle grass and this is what the adolescent turtles begin
doing as well.
It may take up to ten years or more until the turtle
reaches sexual maturity.
It is now that another remarkable event in the life
of the turtle occurs.
No matter where they have been living and feeding
for the last ten or twenty years the turtle now swims
back, possibly across an entire ocean, to the beach of its
birth. This
means that turtles feeding in the sea grass beds off the
coast of Florida may migrate anywhere to the coast of the
Carolinas or Mexico or to coastal Brazil to lay their
eggs.
The impression of watching these
animals haul out to lay their eggs was one of awe.
I was witness to a primal cycle of life of a
remarkable creature.
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Copyright Herrmann Studio 2010 |
Independence
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