Padre Island sea turtle Kemps Ridley
— the smallest sea turtle, walking home.
Not only on a wall.
Padre Island sea turtle Kemps Ridley, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Kemp's ridley is the smallest sea turtle in the world and the most endangered. The species nests on a thin arc of Gulf coast from Rancho Nuevo in Tamaulipas up to Padre Island, where rangers escort hatchlings down to the surf on summer mornings. A century ago there were tens of thousands of nests a season. Today the count is read out loud, one by one.
The place, in three passes.
The Kemp's ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys kempii) is the smallest of the seven sea turtle species; adults weigh seventy to one hundred pounds and rarely exceed two feet in carapace length. It is also the most endangered. Almost the entire global nesting population uses a single two-hundred-mile arc of Gulf coast, from Rancho Nuevo in Tamaulipas, Mexico, north to Padre Island National Seashore in Texas. The bi-national recovery program between the U.S. National Park Service and Mexico's CONANP has slowly rebuilt the species from a 1985 low of fewer than three hundred nesting females.
Nesting at Padre runs April through July. The Kemp's ridley is one of only two sea turtle species that nest in arribadas, the synchronized mass nestings that still happen at Rancho Nuevo, and in solitary nests along Padre. Eggs incubate fifty to sixty days in the sand. Rangers relocate Padre nests to a protected hatchery at Malaquite, where they are monitored until emergence. Public hatchling releases happen on summer mornings when conditions and hatchling survival forecasts allow; the park's Hatchling Hotline (361-949-7163) posts each release the evening before.
Hatchling releases at Malaquite Beach are free and open to the public. They happen between mid-June and August, usually around sunrise, when the sand is cool enough for the hatchlings to walk down to the surf on their own. The Hatchling Hotline (361-949-7163) and the park's social channels announce each release the evening before. Standing back, no flash photography, and following ranger instructions are required so the hatchlings imprint on the beach and not on the human ring around them.
