By Sian Williams | Project Leader
Bright news for the end of the turtle nesting season: we are officially a registered Yayasan!
One of our biggest milestones this year has been becoming a registered Yayasan (foundation). We’ve always been nestled as a project within our larger environmental organisation, but with your help, we’ve grown much more than this now!
This gives Proyek Penyu a stronger foundation for the future and allows us to begin working towards formal agreements and MOUs with Indonesia’s wildlife authorities. We want to be able to formally document, report and share the work we are doing to protect Gili Trawangan’s sea turtles and promote natural, responsible turtle send-offs.
For us, this is also an important step toward a bigger dream: creating a conservation centre on Gili Trawangan where visitors can learn about sea turtles, conservation, and our work without keeping turtles in captivity or using them for entertainment.
Another record-breaking nesting season
This was, once again, our busiest turtle season to date.
Throughout the season, the Proyek Penyu turtle rangers responded to turtle sightings, nest emergencies and hatchling call-outs across our Turtle Response Network. In total, 8,216 hatchlings were safely sent off to sea, with releases taking place approximately 6–12 hours after hatching.
Every send-off was supervised by our local turtle rangers, who briefed visitors on how to watch without interfering with the hatchlings' natural journey to the ocean.
Creating safer send-offs
Our long-term goal has always been to allow hatchlings to make their natural journey to the sea as soon as possible after emerging from the nest.
However, Gili Trawangan's beaches become extremely busy during the tourist high season. Evening crowds, bright lights, music and beach furniture can create obstacles for hatchlings and increase the risk of them becoming disorientated, trapped or injured before reaching the water.
For this reason, we made the decision early in the season to carry out our supervised send-offs at dawn, before sunrise or as close as possible to the morning high tide.
This gave the hatchlings a quieter and safer route to the sea, while also allowing our rangers to manage the crowds and establish clear and ethical rules around the releases.
Visitors were asked to remain at least one metre away from the hatchlings' route, minimise flash photography and stay out of the water while the hatchlings were swimming towards the sea. Cordoned off areas can only be passed by trained volunteers, and hatchlings only handled by the rangers themselves.
Even with some releases taking place as early as 6am, we sometimes welcomed more than 70 people who wanted to witness this incredible natural event.
While large audiences can create challenges, they also provide an opportunity for education. Our rangers have become increasingly confident in explaining not only what we do, but why natural hatchling releases matter.
Our rangers
Behind every successful send-off is our local turtle ranger team.
For more than three months, our rangers spent almost every single evening responding to calls across the island. This season has been a huge learning experience for the team. Their confidence, knowledge and ability to communicate with visitors have grown enormously.
The briefings given before each send-off have become an important part of our conservation work — turning a few minutes of watching turtles into an opportunity to teach visitors about nesting behaviour, threats to sea turtles and how humans can reduce our impact.
Nest protection remains one of our biggest challenges
Hatchlings are only one part of the story. Protecting the nests themselves remains one of our greatest challenges.
This season, almost every nest laid on Gili Trawangan required relocation or additional intervention.
Increasing development along the coastline meant that some nesting areas were no longer safe. In some cases, protective cages around nests were even moved when construction work began.
Beach erosion was another major issue. The removal of coastal trees in some areas has contributed to changing beach conditions, with some nests becoming surrounded by soil, debris or poor-quality sand.
With almost 60 nests at our busiest point, spread across approximately 7 km of coastline, monitoring and protecting every nest became increasingly difficult — even with five rangers and countless dedicated volunteers making themselves available to respond.
These challenges have shown us that we need to develop a more organised system for nest protection as the number of nesting turtles continues to grow.
What comes next?
Becoming a registered Yayasan was a huge goal for Proyek Penyu — but it is also the beginning of a new chapter.
Our next major goal is to secure a safe piece of land on Gili Trawangan where we can establish a temporary, ethical incubation centre.
This would allow us to relocate nests that are genuinely at risk into one carefully managed location, where we can better control:
Centralising vulnerable nests would also allow our rangers to monitor them more efficiently, rather than travelling across the entire island to check dozens of individual nests.
Most importantly, this would not be a turtle tank or visitor attraction. Our aim is to create a natural incubation environment where eggs can hatch safely and hatchlings can be released into the ocean as naturally and quickly as possible.
This is the next step towards our long-term vision: a Gili Trawangan conservation centre focused on education, research and responsible turtle conservation — without keeping turtles in captivity for entertainment.
With your support, we can continue building the systems, knowledge and infrastructure needed to protect Gili Trawangan's turtles for many seasons to come.
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