Victoria Farncombe meets a Birmingham man doing his bit to save an endangered turtle species.
Amdeep Sanghera wakes up and surveys the view from his apartment.
The clear blue waters of the Caribbean ocean are less than 15ft away and the 32-year-old conservationist enjoys his breakfast porridge watching eagle rays jump and sharks circle.
Then it’s down to business.
Slipping into a pair of shorts and T-shirt, the Birmingham-born scientist heads down to the dock where he is known simply to local fishermen on the Turks and Caicos Islands as ‘Turtle Man’.
It’s all a far cry from the streets of Smethwick where Sanghera grew up.
As a schoolboy at King Edward VI Grammar School, in Bartley Green, he dreamed of becoming an accountant.
But a two-week work placement quickly made him see that number-crunching was not for him. Instead, the maths graduate decided to travel the world, volunteering at wildlife projects in far-flung places such as Ghana, Kenya and Western Australia.
“I was really interested in the relationship between people and natural resources,” he says.
From there he returned to the UK to study for a masters research degree in environment and development at Lancaster University, which led to his job on the stunning Turks and Caicos Islands.
World-class hotels, spas and restaurants bring thousands of tourists to the sun-drenched paradise each year. But Amdeep was there with one goal only – to understand how to save the threatened green and seriously endangered hawksbill turtles from extinction.
A research project in 2002 by the Marine Conservation Society in conjunction with universities had shown the population of nesting turtles was in serious decline and the legislation to protect turtles was outdated. Despite his goal, Amdeep knew he could not alienate the islanders.
“The first thing I had to do was engage the fisherman and get accepted into the community,” says Amdeep. “My objective was to understand the nature of the turtle harvest. How many turtles are killed each year. Where do they come from?
