Well, it looks as though leatherback season is officially here! November 9th was the last night that Earthwatch Group 2 was here, and the night we received the most leatherbacks of the season!
We were on split shifts (one group early, one group late) and the first group had already left the beach along with about 50 tourists and their guides. Our truck was broken, thus my volunteer and I had to walk all the way to the south rather than drive, which worked in our favor. We ran into the first turtle after about 15 minutes, and since there were no tourists and the tide was so low that it was not likely we would run into another turtle, Kim and I decided both volunteers could watch. For those of you that have been following cheer for the turtles, it was Tamarinda, who laid just under 90 eggs. (This is an unusually high number.)
After the first turtle, my volunteer, Mary, and I had to get to the south. We, however, were stopped by another turtle just 5 minutes later that was just finishing crawling up the beach and began creating her body pit. She, however, looked like she was just coming off of a nest and was camouflaging it from predators. My heart sank as I thought we had just missed a turtle because we stayed at the previous turtle. I ran up to her to try and scan her incase I would need to put a pit tag in her so we could ID which turtle it was that came up in this spot. Sure enough, she had no tags. As I got the needle prepared to tag her, she began to dig a nest chamber...what a relief! I had not missed the turtle. Kim came to our turtle during her break to make sure I was tagging her correctly, since it was my first time tagging a leatherback. Everything went smoothly, and she laid almost 100 eggs!
At this point in the night we had only completed half of a sweep, as opposed to the 2 that would have normally been completed in the two hour time frame. Mary and I tried to rush to the south and finish our section, but it was no use. We ran into another turtle five minutes later. I walked up her track to see where she was in the nesting process, and she was just finishing crawling up the beach. When I went back to my volunteer to explain what the turtle was doing. I saw a funny patch of sand without tracks that looked like a turtle. I walked about 30 meters to investigate, and in fact, it was another leatherback! The reason she had no tracks was because the waves were rushing up to her body pit due to the fact that she was nesting too low on the beach. Since she appeared to be almost done with her egg chamber, we were going to have to relocate the eggs, I set up behind her with a plastic bag until the eggs started to drop. At that point, Mary took over and collected the remaining eggs as I began running back and forth between the two turtles with my scanner. The first turtle we had seen before, but the one that we had to relocate the eggs for was La Famosa Tom! Leave it to the turtle named after my friend Tom Backof to be difficult and make us do extra work. (If you knew Tom at all you would think he told the turtle to do that to us)!
Once Tom had finished laying eggs, we had to quickly pull the bag out before she had put too much sand on top and before the tide came. At this point it was already crashing on our feet. We temporarily buried the bag of eggs in the sand so maintain temperature and quickly sprinted off to the next turtle to get Mary back in place for counting eggs again. Kim came to get Tom's eggs and relocate them in the hatchery as Mary and I worked on our final turtle of the evening. Once that turtle was done we finally were able to complete our sweep of the beach at 3:30am! At 4am we took off to go back to the house and mark all the nests now that the turtles were no longer on top of them...or so we thought. The turtle that came up with Tom was still camouflaging, and when we tried to recover the thermocouple (what we use to read the temperature), she turned around and decided to run right over the top of it. We tried to find it after she moved For a half hour we searched, but it was almost 5am so we gave up to try again in the afternoon..
That is my most exciting news in the past week. I however, also did receive the rest of my supplies, checked to make sure everything was sterile, and will get to start my actual project today...I hope! When the rains came, they sent all kinds of trees down the rivers, which have managed to find their way onto our beach. We tried doing some beach cleaning so that the turtles could get on to the beach and nest, but it took 30 of us 3 hours to only go 500m of the 3.5km beach. I'll go take some pics so you guys can see how hard it is for the turtles to find a nesting spot right now. The only other news I can think of is that we had a hawksbill stranding and I was able to get some cool pics of that!
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