Bwärä Tortues Marines: Guarding New Caledonia's Loggerhead Turtle Beach

Founded in 2006 in Bourail, New Caledonia, Bwärä Tortues Marines protects the La Roche Percée and Turtle Bay beaches, the country's main nesting site for critically endangered loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) and the second most important in the South Pacific. Volunteers and eco-guards conduct dawn and dusk patrols through the November-to-May nesting season, tagging females, shielding nests from predators and disturbance, and running a free daily visitor education center. The association carried out the first long-term capture-mark-recapture monitoring of the nesting population, identifying 452 individually tagged nesting females between 2006 and 2020. It also runs coastal dune reforestation to stabilize nesting habitat against erosion.