Dallas Zoo Conservation Story // Katy Trail Weekly

This past June, I traveled to South Padre Island with a team from the Dallas Zoo on a conservation trip for a day working with the team at Sea Turtle, Inc. who rehabilitate about 100 sea turtles each year for return to the wild. Every year, multiple species of sea turtles come ashore to lay eggs on the beaches of South Padre Island and Boca Chica Beach. The most common nesting female they encounter is the critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle. Sea turtles with less than 75 percent of their flippers are deemed unsuitable for life in the wild and end up living at the facility to help educate the public. Volunteers who took part in this trip painted murals, helped with gift shop inventory, collected trash along the beach, got to view a nesting site, and attend an early morning release of baby sea turtles and experience the thrill of seeing them take their very first step s as they scurried across the sandy beach and into the ocean waters.

I was able to share my experience and talk more about the conservation efforts by the Dallas Zoo in a FRONT PAGE story which published in the September 10, 2021 issue of the Katy Trail Weekly. CLICK HERE to read it in its entirety.