A turtle has been flown to Texas after being washed up on a beach over 4,000 miles away from home.
Tally the turtle was left stranded on the beach in Flintshire, North Wales, in 2021.
She made the 22-hour journey by air to the US on Wednesday to be released from there into her native waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
The turtle had spent 20 months of rehabilitation at Anglesey Sea Zoo and her stateside return, which has been almost a year in the planning, “would not have been possible” without support from RAF Valley, according to Gem Simmonds from British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR).
Ms Simmonds told Sky News Tally’s was an “unusual stranding”, as not many turtles wash up on UK shores.
Most of those that do are loggerhead sea turtles but Tally was even more unexpected – a Kemp’s ridley – the world’s most endangered species of sea turtle.
“You’re kind of a little bit reluctant to admit it because Kemp’s ridleys are the most endangered turtle in the world,” Ms Simmonds said.
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“They’re incredibly rare and they’re only really found around the Gulf of Mexico, and sometimes the juveniles out into the Atlantic, but generally-speaking not in the UK and definitely not alive.”
Tally was named after Talacre, the beach opposite the Wirral in the mouth of the River Dee where she was discovered by a dog walker during Storm Arwen.
“She was in a cold, stunned state and that’s essentially a state of unconsciousness, and that involves organs shutting down and they float around on currents and what will eventually happen is they’ll die and they’re at risk of being hit by boats and all sorts of stuff, so really at the mercy of the oceans at that point,” Ms Simmonds added.
“We assume that she’d just essentially hitched a ride on the gulf stream; they do that to migrate up the Eastern Seaboard [of the US] anyway, become unconscious… and she’d been knocked off in the storm and ended up with us here in little old North Wales.”
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Tally has now safely landed in Houston, where she will be assessed and is expected to be released in the coming days.
“We’re just so happy that she’s going back to where she belongs,” Ms Simmonds said.
“It’s just the impacts of climate change and multiple other things that we are getting them ending up over here.”
