Half Moon Nights – Time with the Sea Turtles
Bivash Pandav has been faculty at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun since 1999 – where he also completed his Masters Degree programme as a student in 1991.
Subsequently, he carried out his doctoral research on marine turtles as a research fellow with the WII along the coast of Odisha to gauge the health of marine turtle population that nests in hundreds of thousands each year. At Nature inFocus, he spoke about his work between 1993 and 2000, an 8-year period spent along the coast of Odisha to understand sea turtles.
He has walked, bicycled, scoured the landscape on motorcycle along the entire coast to document the plight of sea turtles. He has witnessed one of nature's exceptional extravaganzas in terms of turtle arribada, counted thousands of dead turtles and spent endless hours with dolphins in the sea. This is a personal account of his journey.