Big Skies “Tag” a Turtle - Pilot

Buy A Tag - Name Your Turtle - Help Protect Its Future

Be part of something special

With R500-00 you could partake in our pilot, you’ll get to sponsor a tag and name one of 30 turtles in phase 1. Once your turtle has been tagged during the 2025 nesting season (Nov - Mar), you’ll receive updates about its movements and journey.

Your contribution will go directly to conservation through the Tim Neary Turtle Trust in 2026, ensuring more Turtles can be studied, protected and kept safe for generations to come. In partnership with EKZN Wildlife

How Does It Work?

  1. You can “Tag” a Turtle by purchasing a tag for R500-00

  2. After your purchase, you will receive a welcome email and details about your purchase. Once a turtle has been tagged, you will receive an email with your Turtles unique tag number, details about the turtle, nesting info and be given the opportunity to name your turtle.

  3. Throughout the turtle season and seasons to come, whenever data is received by EKZN Wildlife on your turtle, it will be shared with you via email

  4. After the end of the turtle season, you will receive a “season summary” report. This will includes the total number of turtles tagged, sightings recorded, highlights from the field and what your R500-00 contribution achieved. The report will also outline when you can expect to hear more about your turtle.

What happens with the proceeds?

All purchases received will go towards the Tim Neary Turtle Trust in 2026 after payment processing fees to contribute further towards turtle research and conservation in Maputaland. Read the full Terms and Conditions here.

Turtle Conservation in Maputaland

In 1963, under the auspices of the Natal parks board, a Turtle conservation and monitoring program was initiated along the north-eastern coast of KZN which is now the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park. This program, currently under the supervision of Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife, is still in existence today. It is one of the longest, continuous Loggerhead/Leatherback turtle monitoring programs in the world.  

The 56km stretch of beach, north (up to Kosi mouth) and south (up to Black Rock) of Bhanga Nek, is the official EKZNW turtle monitoring area. The main objective of the program is to collect nesting and turtle size information that can be used in estimating the turtle population and the distribution of the nesting sea turtles in South Africa and southern Mozambique, while simultaneously providing protection to nesting females.  

Two species of turtle are monitored, the loggerhead and the leatherback turtle.  

Every season, local turtle monitors are appointed and trained before the turtle season begins. 

The basic protocol during a patrol by the monitors entails the following: When an adult turtle is found, its species is identified, the carapace is measured, the flippers are checked for calluses or notches as these would indicate the presence of previous tags or otherwise that she had hatched within the monitoring area during a previous season. The flippers are checked for tags, if no tags are present then two tags are clipped onto her flipper. She is then scanned for a microchip and if present then the microchip number is recorded, otherwise a microchip is inserted. 

Buy a Tag

and sponsor a turtle

A Turtle Tag

ZAR R500

Turtle Conservation in Maputaland

In 1963, under the auspices of the Natal parks board, a Turtle conservation and monitoring program was initiated along the north-eastern coast of KZN which is now the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park. This program, currently under the supervision of Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife, is still in existence today. It is one of the longest, continuous Loggerhead/Leatherback turtle monitoring programs in the world.  

The 56km stretch of beach, north (up to Kosi mouth) and south (up to Black Rock) of Bhanga Nek, is the official EKZNW turtle monitoring area. The main objective of the program is to collect nesting and turtle size information that can be used in estimating the turtle population and the distribution of the nesting sea turtles in South Africa and southern Mozambique, while simultaneously providing protection to nesting females.  

Two species of turtle are monitored, the loggerhead and the leatherback turtle.  

Every season, local turtle monitors are appointed and trained before the turtle season begins. 

The basic protocol during a patrol by the monitors entails the following: When a turtle is found, its species is identified, the carapace is measured, the flippers are checked for calluses or notches as these would indicate the presence of previous tags or otherwise that she had hatched within the monitoring area during a previous season. The flippers are checked for tags, if no tags are present then two tags are clipped onto her flipper. She is then scanned for a microchip and if present then the microchip number is recorded, otherwise a microchip is inserted

Why do turtles move us?

Time and time again, season after season, we come back to this moment: how do we talk about turtles?
They are our magnet, the iconic creatures that have pulled guests to Maputaland for years, and yet they are niche creatures. They have also been squeezed into a less-than-helpful corner of the global conversation. You’ve heard it: “think of the turtles” every time someone reaches for a plastic straw. The guilt passes, and you may think, “who cares about turtles - just give me my smoothie.” Others care so deeply that they’re angry we’re even acknowledging the first group.

Then comes October and it’s once again time to talk about our USP (unique selling point for those of you that aren’t into business). We start reeling off facts about them to convince people to come to our lodge and see them (leatherback turtles are massive, did we mention that?) This year, however, we wanted to go a little deeper. The impact of a seeing an old leatherback mother trying to lay her eggs on the dune can sharply and unexpectedly overwhelm a person to tears, and yet they have a brain roughly the size of a small peanut. So the question is, why? Why have they even become a marketing tool? (did we mention they are massive?) Why do they force people from all walks of life to the point of tears? There’s no easy explanation - gorillas look like people so that’s at least a starting point but turtles just look like a moving piece of oversized luggage with a rugby ball tied to the end (did we mention they are ginormous). Edit: they look utterly different from us, and we still feel something real (ignore the fact that someone who cares deeply about conservation just said a turtle looks like a piece of luggage.

In short, and without rude comparisons, why does this creature make us care at all? Long before marketing and capitalism, would our early hominid ancestors have stopped to watch a gigantic turtle haul herself up a dune for two hours, decide the spot wasn’t quite right, and try again later? We firmly believe so.

Turtles have come to mean more than plastic and marketability. What gets us is how we feel on the beach when one appears - the quiet shock of it. It’s a ritual older than we are: tiny hatchlings facing the onslaught of life, mothers returning from far oceans to lay again almost where they began. And the tug on the heart isn’t only about fragility under human pressure, or the distances they travel, or the effort of that dune climb. It’s the recognition that there have been rituals and lives of creatures and stories of rituals that are independent of us and there will be after us.

From here, our job is practical. We’re a small lodge that happens to share a coastline with an important rookery, a nesting area where female turtles return, season after season, to lay their eggs. With all our philosophising about why turtles matter, we’d like to invite you to dive into their world with us this season. With permission from turtles.co.za, we’ve dug into work by Masters and PhD researchers so we can bring you the clearest, up-to-date science about “our” turtles without the jargon. If you don’t yet know what an epibiont is (a hitch-hiking organism that lives on a turtle’s shell and can hint at where she’s been), you will, and you’ll see why it matters. Our hope is that turtles become more than the symbol of a guilt trip from a well-meaning friend, or the sheer overwhelming size (yes they are large creatures) but that they become something you understand and want to protect because it’s right.

FAQs

  • Description text goes here
  • Description text goes here
  • Description text goes here
  • Item description
  • Item description
  • Item description
  • Item description
  • Item description
  • Item description
  • Item description