Found Turtle!

Saturday, August 19^th

Because the tide is so early in the morning, we have been combining crawl counts with one of the patrols. If you are lucky, you can catch the last turtles coming up to nest, which I did! I found my first turtle that actually laid eggs! I found one about a month ago, but she went back into the ocean without laying. I don’t think I have ever been so excited. I saw some tracks and decided to follow them up. It took me a minute, but then I saw her. I was with Lynn and she said that when I turned around to whisper “Turtle!” my face had pure joy on it. We both started celebrating silently. We circled the tracks to indicate that she was ours and then waited for her to finish digging. Once she stopped moving and started laying, I dug the tunnel to her nest chamber. It was so cool to feel the eggs fall into my hand…they were so warm and slimy! A parlamero saw the tracks later and flashed his light at her. I went up to him to ask him to stop and you could tell he was annoyed that we found the turtle first. We found her at about the 2 km mark, so we decided to walk the rest of our crawl count before burying the eggs. All along the way, people (mostly fishermen) were congratulating us and saying what good luck we have. My favorite fisherman, Abalino, gave me a thumbs up and said how proud he was. I liked how nice everyone was! The total nest number was 107, which is on the bigger end of the spectrum for nest sizes!

The rest of the day, I directed people around the parque like usual. I have a really great group of volunteers right now, so they have been making it pretty easy for me to be in charge while Glenda is gone for another week. At night, I went to Alice’s to have a couple beers with Lynn. It was nice to be out of the parque for a couple hours and not think about it or talk about it.