It was 2011 when Cora Berchem arrived at a hotel in Miami, FL, to attend a conference with her film and television company. Berchem, who came from Germany to the States to pursue a career in communications and filmmaking, was used to traveling to different places. Little did she know, this trip would change her life. It all began when she visited a promotional stand in the Miami hotel lobby and saw a cuddly gray plushy of an unfamiliar sea creature which at first she thought was a whale.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s so cute,’” Berchem said. “I was told it’s a Florida manatee … I had never heard of a manatee before we bought the toy.”
Interested in all kinds of wildlife, Berchem started researching what a manatee was.
“They’re well studied at this point, but they’re not as well known,” Berchem said. “I think they fascinated me because everybody knows what a dolphin, a seal or sea lion is. But a manatee, there’s still a lot of people who don’t know a lot about it.”
Inspired, Berchem found her new passion project: a documentary about these gentle giants. She interviewed many professionals around Florida, featuring the efforts of Save the Manatee Club and local zoos.
“One of the ladies I interviewed at Zoo Tampa … I heard her talk and realized how passionate these people were,” Berchem said. “So when I went back up north, I had a job there and I said, ‘What am I doing here? Where are these people? They’re saving lives down in Florida.’”
Berchem, already familiar with Save the Manatee Club from almost two years of collaboration in bringing the documentary to life, took the first opportunity to work with them for a short period of three months. Eleven years later, Berchem is still with the manatees, working as the communications director for spreading awareness on these gentle creatures.
“I think about finding ways to communicate that knowledge, because there’s a lot of these scientists out there that have this amazing body of knowledge, but if you want people to care and make a difference, you have to communicate it on a level that they can relate to and understand,” Berchem said.
Along with her job running the social media, digital web cameras and other educational events, Berchem shadowed the park’s manatee researcher of 40 years, Wayne Hartley. There, Berchem worked hands-on with manatees in participating in morning roll calls — a headcount and documentation of all manatees in the spring each morning — and rescues. Throughout the years, she created countless unforgettable memories of seeing manatees recuperate from injuries and their total rise to a record number of 827 — each success story a testament to their conservation efforts and the manatee’s resilience.
“The most rewarding thing is if you see an animal that you rescued and released comes back,” Berchem said. “Especially an animal that wasn’t doing well the season before and now you see that it’s all healed up and doing great … you get the feeling that you are making a difference for
them.”
Now during the winter season, Berchem finds herself on a canoe every morning spending time with these manatees, recognizing each of them. Occasionally, she will see her favorite, Annie, whose calf was first spotted by Berchem right after its birth. Other times, she will spot Mampee, the manatee named after the first little stuffed animal she got at the hotel lobby in Miami.
“Sometimes you just never know,” Berchem said. “If you had told me when I was in college that I would be working in Florida right now with manatees, that was not something I would have ever considered. You never know, and if you have a passion for something, go with it, even if it’s not the direct path of getting somewhere.”
