Moto Friend

Thursday, October 4^th

There were so many nests on crawl count this morning! It took me forever to erase all of the tracks and nests. After crawl counts, I got another ride from the woman who lives across the street from the park. This time, she honked and slowed down as soon as she saw me. It’s nice that she recognizes me now.

Later in the morning, we dug a trench around the small hatchery because we found a lot of roots in one corner. By digging a small trench, it prevents the roots from continuing to grow into the hatchery. It was hard work because the sand was dry and it kept falling back into the holes we were digging. Tomorrow we will have to dig inside the hatchery to get rid of all of the roots on the inside.

After digging, I tried to take a short nap, but was woken up and told that Sabine had arrived. She told me earlier that she was coming back for a couple of weeks. I was so happy to see her! Not only is she a friend, but she is a GREAT volunteer…super motivated and willing to work. We had a great time catching up. She had just gotten done with traveling for three weeks, so it was fun to hear about everywhere that she went.

Tonight was a slow night for turtles. Literally nothing came up. I’m not surprised though because so many came up last night.

More Restoration

Wednesday, October 3th

We got up nice and early today for another reforestation effort. We all got on the back of Colum’s pickup and headed to the canal to take a ferry over to the farm. Only about 50% of the plants from last time survived the machine that the locals used, so we replanted where the plants used to be. It wasn’t nearly as hot or as mosquito filled as last time, which was nice. Since we have a lot of volunteers now, we were able to get about half of the rest of the trees planted. We will probably only need one more day of reforestation to finish planting all of the trees that we raised. 

 Everyone piling out of the truck

 View from our ferry

After we got back, I was supposed to go to Alice’s for Spanish, but I was way too tired. Instead, I took a nice, long, much needed nap. It was great! Later, I had a successful patrol night with two nests bought and some hatchlings successfully release.

Turtle > Nap

Tuesday, October 2^nd

Luckily, I marked down where the nine tracks that we found last night were because most of them were washed away by the tide and the rain. The rest of the morning was pretty normal…I counted the tracks, returned to the park, and released one lone hatchling.

While volunteers did yard work around the parque, I spent the rest of the morning entering the hatchery data for this month so that we could see our egg total. We collected around 14,000 eggs this month, which is good considering we had mostly just two volunteers the whole time.

During free time, I went up to the tower to read. While I was reading/napping, some volunteers that had been playing in the ocean saw a turtle come up and claimed the nest! It was a small nest of only 37 eggs, but it was still a turtle whose nest was fully ours and not one that we had to buy. It was a great way to get woken up from a nap. After burying the eggs, I did a bunch of nest excavations and showed some of the new volunteers how to do them as well.

At night, it rained for the first time in what seemed like FOREVER! Of course it was right when I went on patrol, but it was OK because a bunch of turtles came out and we were able to buy three nests!

An Almost Full Park

Monday, October 1^st  

After crawl counts, I organized and cleaned all of the patrol kits. They got a LITTLE out of order while I was gone. The other volunteers organized some new ARCAS t-shirts that were delivered. We definitely needed some new ones. Right as I was finishing, Judit got back from taking Riikka to Antigua! We both needed stuff at the tienda, so we made the trip together and caught up.

In the afternoon, we got three more volunteers. The park is about 4 beds short of being full. Most of the volunteers are German and they all seem nice. I spent the next couple hours getting them acquainted with the park.

I took one of the new volunteers on patrol with me, but it was kind of a bad night for her first night of patrolling. We kept JUST missing nests…as in the turtle and the parlamero with the nest had already left by the time we saw the tracks. For the first turtle that we did come across, the parlamero wouldn’t let us buy the nest or get a donation because he wanted to sell to the Monterrico hatchery. The Monterrico hatchery not only gets money from the government, but it also pays parlameros for “donations.” Thus, parlameros get more money by selling to them instead of us. It’s not fair because we should get money from the government as well. Not only do we use better techniques and take more data, but we treat the hatchlings with much more care than they do. 

Later, a young local named Abalito (who about a month ago brought us a boa in order to save it from being killed) called me over to a turtle and a parlamero. The turtle wasn’t laying her eggs, so the man flipped her on her back to try and make her lay the eggs. I was furious and so was he! We both attempted to flip the turtle back over and get it back to the sea, but he kept flipping her over again. We tried to explain that he was stressing her out and that flipping her over wouldn’t cause her to lay her eggs. He wouldn’t listen though. I asked Abalito for this parlameros name and the parlamero overheard me. He got extremely angry and started threatening us because he thought we were going to call the police. Unfortunately, we did about all that we could and had to leave the situation. Abalito seemed like he was going to stay with the turtle, so hopefully he was able to talk some sense in the man. Luckily, the night got a little better because we were able to get a donation near the end of our patrol. At least the walk wasn’t all for naught. In addition, I was able to mark down 9 tracks for my crawl count tomorrow.

Time

Sunday, September 30^th

It felt a little weird today getting back in the swing of things after being away for about a week. Time in general just seems to move weirdly down here. 

Anyways, I spent most of the day cleaning and acquainting some new volunteers with the parque. While I was gone and Riikka was sick, things at the parque kind of fell by the wayside, so a massive cleanup was in order…bathrooms, kitchen, visitor center, walkways, etc.

It was a quiet day with not much to do, so I was able to finally catch up on uploading to my blog. The night was similarly quiet…released one batch of hatchlings and saw no turtles on patrol.