The Turtle Who Could Fly

By David Hunt

Turtles don't run in packs, but journalists do. That may explain the whirlwind of media coverage for the arrival of a young sea turtle named Willy, who jetted into the Raleigh Durham International Airport last Thursday after two years in Britain.

Willy shared her flight across the Atlantic with a BBC documentary film crew that is exhaustively chronicling the repatriation of the rare turtle to American soil. Never mind that Willy probably isn't a U.S. turtle at all, but a seasonal immigrant from Mexico, according to turtle experts. She apparently wandered outside her usual migratory path along the East Coast in 2007 and, carried by currents, ended up in Britain's Woolabombe Bay. Discovered on a beach, she was taken to the Weymouth Sea Life Park to recuperate from her ordeal.

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