June Haimoff

June Haimoff is an English environmentalist who settled in Dalyan in southwestern Turkey (Muğla Province) after her retirement and has launched a successful campaign for the conservation of loggerhead sea turtles ("Caretta caretta") which lay their eggs in the İztuzu Beach in Dalyan.

Ms. Haimoff was born in Essex. She pursued the ambition of becoming an opera singer and did her studies in music, dancing and ballet, and later on she was seriously engaged in painting. Due to her father's profession, who was a prominent petroleum engineer, she toured all over the Middle East.

She visited southwestern Turkey for the first time in July 1975, long before the mass tourism arrived in the region, with a boat ("Bouboulina") purchased in Greece. Affectionately called "Kaptan June" ("Captain June") by the locals as she came to be known, she settled in Dalyan on a permanent basis as of 1984, living with a dozen dogs and cats in a solitary barrack on the beach. She realized that the sea turtles unique to the locality were lethally menaced by the buildings that were starting to rise like mushrooms on the beach with the development of tourism. Since then, she dedicated her efforts to assure conservation of the site as well as attracting international attention to the fate of the turtles. She relates the struggle and the victory for the preservation of these species in her book titled "Kaptan June and the Turtles" published in 1997.

thumb|200px|left|Cover_of_the_Turkish edition of "Kaptan June and the Dalyan Turtles"She currently pursues her efforts in a wider frame, concerned with preservation in a more general sense of the nature in the unique flora and fauna of the Lake Köyceğiz-Dalyan and the vicinity. She is particularly focused on the protection of Oriental Sweetgum trees ("Liquidambar orientalis"), another exceptional species proper to the region.

ee also

* Dalyan
* Loggerhead sea turtle
* Oriental Sweetgum

References

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