Fed charger, home of the Turtle Charger

About Turtle Island

The island of Pulau Upeh off the Malaysian State of Malacca has only one small sandy beach. But it happens to be one of the most important hawksbill nesting sites in the country.

Although the tiny island (seven-acres or 0.03km² in size) is for the moment uninhabited, it is not entirely out of reach of turtle egg poachers. Nor has it fully escaped the rapid coastal development which threatens all that remains of turtle beaches in Malacca.

Malaysia, itself, was until recently one of only seven countries in the world where leatherback turtles landed in many numbers, but no more. Now the struggle is on to save the country's beautiful but critically endangered hawksbill with its golden brown, exquisitely patterned shell, which still nests on the beaches of the Malacca Straits - the second most important nesting area in the country.

But the island of Pulau Upeh and its beach are under immediate threat from two directions. Recently, its present owners, the Tenaga National Electricity Company (TNB), which took over the island three years ago as a possible training centre for its staff, announced that the island was for sale. At the same time, developers working with the state government are busy reclaiming a second 1.6km2 (or 400-acre) slice of Malacca Bay, reaching within a kilometer or so of the island. The effects of this on Malacca's beaches, including the narrow beach on Pulau Upeh, already the subject of erosion, is unknown. No overall environmental impact study of this reclamation work, or of other coastal infilling and development in neighboring Negri Sembilan State, on Malacca's coast has been undertaken - or if it has, it has not been made public.

But, environmentalists point out that any major obstruction of the tidal flow through the straits is likely to result in a loss of sand to the beaches, interrupting the flushing interplay of the tides, which renews any sand that is temporarily washed away. Moreover, the sand for reclamation is dredged from the straits seabed, leaving depressions, which are naturally refilled, from coastal regions.

Leatherback crash

The fact that beach erosion is taking place was confirmed in a detailed study by Malaysia's Ministry of Drainage and Irrigation some years ago. It is also self evident to property owners along the shoreline, and has caused the state government to take measures to build a new sea wall in sections of the Malacca sea front and to place concrete barriers elsewhere to shore up the beaches.

At Pulau Upeh, spring tides are already covering the nesting areas and the narrow strip of sandy beach, already damaged by mud and rubble from previous building works, is in danger of being washed away.

This is especially disturbing since only in the last few years have serious attempts begun to conserve Malaysia's turtles. It is probably too late to save the leatherbacks which, in living memory, used to make over 10,000 landings to lay eggs on the less developed east coat of the peninsula, but whose numbers crashed quite recently. In the past decade, the fisheries department recorded fewer than ten leatherback nestings annually.

There is a much greater chance of saving the country's hawksbills, whose nests have been stabilized at 200-300 each year since records started being kept in 1988. The fisheries department has set up five hatcheries around the coast so that more eggs can be moved to safety until they hatch out.