ANOTHER Found Turtle

Thursday, August 30^th

Today on crawl counts I found ANOTHER turtle! Apparently, I’m lucky in the mornings. It was annoying though because 3 dogs joined a volunteer and I on the walk and they were barking at the turtle, wanting to play with it, etc. It was hard to hold them back and dig the tunnel to her nest. Luckily, my favorite morning parlamero saw us and helped hold the dogs back. The nest had 112 eggs! Right now I’m personally responsible for over 300 eggs and it feels good!

During the day, Megan and Ryan worked on hatchery. They renovate houses back home, so they have a ton of experience fixing stuff up. They are doing a super good job. I’m so thankful that they decided to come here and stay for a little while! While they were fixing the small hatchery, I put more palms on the big hatchery. It was getting too warm in some places and Willi and Mariachi didn’t want to do it themselves, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and climb up. We were able to get about a quarter of it done. We still have a ways to go unfortunately.

The hatchery about half-way finished

In the afternoon, I went to Alice’s sea turtle identification workshop for the local fisherman. It was interesting to see how these fishermen responded to the new information. The president of the Fishing Association was asking intelligent questions and seemed pretty interested. She wanted to put on the workshop in order to have them start collecting data for her. I’m curious to see if they are able to put their new skills to use. I also helped a volunteer start making thank you posters to the parlameros that have donated more than 12 eggs. I’m hoping recognition will be an incentive for donating more eggs. We are going to put them up in all the schools and tiendas. I’m excited to see what the reaction will be!

The signs read "Thank you very much for your donations of more than 12 eggs! (followed by the names of the parlameros)"

Tonight was a weird patrol night! First of all, it was raining super hard! Second of all, some parlameros lied to us and said they only had 41 eggs in their nest. However, we saw them pull out a lot more. I’ve thought about it and thought about it and I can’t see what they gained by lying to us. Later in the night, we came up two guys who had found a turtle. They said they would give us a donation, so we waited 45 minutes for the turtle to lay. When it came time to give us the eggs, they said they were splitting the nest so they were only going to give us 6 eggs. I tried asking them for 6 eggs each, but they refused. I was super mad for the rest of the walk back to the park and soaked to top it off.