Sixty-five, then one: a quarter century of counting at Kolavipalam

There is a reason this beach has a scientific record at all, and it is not that scientists came looking. Theeram counted every nest here for a quarter of a century, wrote the dates down, and then the ledger went to researchers. Twice.

The first paper

In 2018, in Ecology, Environment and Conservation, a study of this beach was published by researchers at the central marine fisheries institute together with two members of Theeram, who appear as co-authors rather than as informants or as subjects. That is worth pausing on. The village is credited as a scientific collaborator on the study of its own shore, which is not how this usually goes.

Its numbers are the backbone of everything anyone knows here. Study area: eight kilometres, from Thikkodi in the south to the Kottapuzha estuary in the north — not the twenty kilometres you will read elsewhere, and not ten. Between 1998-99 and 2015-16, 410 olive ridley nests. A peak of 65 nesting females, reached in 1999-2000 and again the following season. A low of four nests in 2015-16. Hatchling releases ranging from 5,508 down to 237, and hatching success from 89.29 per cent in 2002-03 down to 33 per cent in 2014-15. Patrols ran November to March, fortnightly, six in the morning to half past eight.

The second paper

The second study, published in January 2025, covers November 2019 to March 2023 and was again done with Theeram. Its central figure is the one that changes how you should read every listing for this place.

Across that whole four-season period, seven adult turtles came ashore. Not seven a season. Seven. And 2020-21 had none at all.

In 2019-20, 363 eggs were collected and 136 hatched. Mean annual eggs hatched across the study was about 54. Overall nesting success was 25.73 per cent. The retrievable version of that paper is anonymised, so we cite the work and not its authors, which is unsatisfying and honest.

The shape

The 2025 paper carries a bar chart of nesting females by season from 1998-99, and reading it off gives roughly this: the low thirties, then 65, then the forties and thirties, then the twenties — and then, somewhere around 2002-03 to 2005-06, a fall into single figures from which the beach has never come back. Sixes and sevens and tens for a decade. Then fives, fours, threes, twos. Then a zero. Then ones.

Those individual values are read off a chart rather than out of a table, so treat each one as approximate. The shape is not approximate. It is a collapse of more than ninety-five per cent, concentrated inside about four years, and it is the single most important fact about this beach.

The two papers do disagree on one thing, which is worth flagging because the number travels widely. Both record a peak of 5,508 hatchlings released in a season; the 2018 paper assigns it to 2000-01 and the 2025 paper to 1998-99. They cannot both be right, so the sensible way to carry it is as a figure from the late 1990s or early 2000s rather than as a fact about a particular year.

The last four seasons

Malayalam reporting takes the record past the papers, and it does not improve. No turtles at all in 2022-23. None in 2023-24. In 2024-25, two: the first laid 101 eggs and the second 153, 254 in all. And in 2025-26, one clutch of 116 eggs — found on 21 February 2026, later in the season than usual, at Payyoli beach, by a fisherman and his son out for a morning walk.

That clutch produced 91 hatchlings, released on 13 April 2026 by the Forest Department and Theeram together, with the Payyoli municipal chairperson and a division councillor in attendance. It was the season’s first release. It was also, so far as the reporting shows, the season.

Which is why this page will not promise you a turtle

Kerala Tourism’s page for this beach, and a long tail of listings behind it, will tell you that you can watch olive ridleys nest at Kolavipalam. On the published record that is effectively false, and it has been for years.

It is a strange thing to have to write about a conservation success. Theeram did the work. The work was not the problem. The beach the work depended on was mined, then walled, and the turtles went somewhere else or nowhere. Come for the estuary, the dunes, the mangroves and the story of what twelve people did with a stick and a notebook. If a turtle turns up, that is a season’s worth of luck.