Paco

Monday, August 27^th

Like I said there would be....there were tons of nests this morning, which meant tons of donations coming in that needed to be buried. I think we buried a couple hundred eggs at least. The rest of the morning I spent talking to Colum about stuff around the parque. Later in the day, we sanded pieces of wood to make a new table for the office. We also organized the patrol kits again and sorted all the towels and sheets.

Glenda and I also made the important decision of adopting the dog that has been hanging around the parque. We’ve tried scaring him away and leaving him places, but he just keeps coming back. Part of the reason we didn’t want him here is because he would come on patrols and bark at turtles. This either makes them go back in the water or pisses off parlameros…neither is a good thing. He also tried to grab a hatchling from my hand. However, we discovered that we can leave him in the office while on patrols and he is perfectly happy. 

  

He is so skinny that both of us felt awful for not feeding him, so we decided to adopt him if he won’t leave. We named him Paco and put a collar on him. Alejandro, the vet for ARCAS, is coming down later this week and will examine him and give him some flea medication. We are going to start training him soon too. He is a super sweet dog and now that I’ve been feeding him, he has already started following me around.

Paco sitting on the side of the road

Two new volunteers came today, so I took one of them with me on patrol. It was a great night for turtles! Fay raised money back home to buy nests from the parlameros, so she gave me some money for the patrol. The parque usually buys eggs when the price is lower, but she wanted all of her money used before she leaves in a few days. After walking about 15 minutes, the volunteer and I spotted some tracks and a parlamero standing by them with a big bag of eggs. We got the donation and then bought the rest of the nest for 14Q instead of the going 15Q rate. We walked awhile farther and then turned around to bury the nest. As we were walking back, we ran into the same parlamero who was in the process of getting eggs from a turtle who had just laid. We got another donation, and then bought 3 dozen eggs with the rest of the money. We kept walking then found ANOTHER parlamero with a turtle. She was still in the process of digging, so we waited for about 20 minutes and then got another donation. By the time we got back to the parque, it had started raining, so we quickly buried the ~150 eggs. It was a late night, but so worth it!