A Turtle watcher's Diary
2009 Season
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Latest From the Project Leader
A busy few weeks for me. I was glad to have the workforce needed to
enable us to begin night work at an early stage and hence already we
have a good list of individual turtles that have visited Alagadi to
lay their first clutch. 36 nests now. Not to mention a male turtle
carrying a satellite transmitter who after a week at sea has now
reached Turkey and begun to traverse the coast towards Mersin,
probably patrolling for females and trying to sew his seeds a far as
possible. First of it’s kind in the Med actually!
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| The Route Taken by the Male Turtle |
It is now getting to that stage where the first nesters having laid a fortnight ago,
will be returning to lay their second clutch of the season, whilst
new females continue to arrive to lay their first. Last night we saw
5 nests, 4 green turtles and 1 loggerhead. At around 2am a storm
whipped up and we were blasted by sand and a number of nests were
washed over by high seas. At half five we waved off the last of the
females in broad daylight as she was engulfed in waves. Quite
surreal and deserving of a celebratory drink before bed. There is
now no question that the season is going to be extremely productive
for both species. I remember the dreaded season of 2005 when we only
had 40 nests on Alagadi, night after night of no activity and
boredom. I expect at least 100 this year.
Now that the volunteers are trained up and with experienced
remigrant volunteers arriving from last season, who’s return was
funded by the Erwin Warth Foundation, the volunteers are
coordinating themselves on the beach well and I am able to snatch an
hour or two to myself in the goat shed, on call and listening out on
the VHF radio. I am really pleased with the team, all of them get on
very well and work together, full of initiative and enthusiasm. With
no new arrivals for a few weeks now I expect that we will become a
very tight group.
We have been tackling the litter problem on Alagadi beaches. Firstly
on Sunday afternoons we are patrolling the beaches handing out black
bags to local family groups to take their litter to the car parks.
Secondly, during the week we are emptying the bins in all of the car
parks and loading all of the rubbish to the beach bar where Gokmen,
the beach bar manager, then ferries it up to the Beledeya in
Esentepe. We hope that the Beledeya will take responsibility for at
least emptying the bins in the near future. We have also organised
beach cleans and special thanks go out to Marylin and friends, who
came down from Catalkoy on Monday to help out on Alagadi 2.
On Sunday the West Coast team returned and stayed over and volunteer
James Johnston and his two friends Woody and Ollie at James’s
parents house in Esentepe hosted a reunion pool party. Sorry James
if your parents were not supposed to find out, but apparently the
house was cleaner when we left than when we arrived. James has been
house sitting for a few weeks whilst diving by day and turtling by
night at Alagadi, not leaving much time for house work. Woody and
Ollie disclosed that James had been tidying all morning in
anticipation of our arrival! A big thanks to James for putting on a
great spread, we all had a well-deserved afternoon off and a
fantastic time.
I took an hour off this afternoon and launched my kayak on Alagadi.
In the middle of bay 3 I noticed a turtle cross underneath me. It
crossed my path a few times moving quite quickly beneath me, almost
inquisitively, and I was able to identify it as a male green turtle.
It emerged to breath beside me and that was the last I saw of him.
Brilliant!
Thursday, June 18, 2009.
Windy days
Night watch continues and is getting very very very busy! Conditions
are also made diffcicult with the weather conditions being as harsh
as they are. While the weather still remains scorching hot during
the day, driving all of us bar boner into the shade (she likes to
bake in the sun in all temps!), the nights are very windy and on
occasion a bit chilly. While some are very prepared for this- ie
Jimbob with his full outfit of thermals and long johns! others such
as me who stupidly brought very little warm clothes are suffering a
little! The wind has made measuring post marks and keeping track of
equipment while being pelted in the eyes by a full blown sand storm
slightly challenging! But we persist and are constantly being
rewarded by a good show of turtles each night.
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| A Turtle Returns to Stormy Seas |
My body clock is finally starting to get into the rhythm and many are now feeling upon returning from night duty up for a little tipple.....or one tippple to many causing a funny and nasty slight for the rest of us the next morning when they finally arise, namely Celli and Gill lol! We are still spring cleaning the goat shed and pottering arond doing bits and bobs of jobs. Some have been to town today and have bought some potted plants to put out front to bring some colour to the place, they look really pretty and we will have to make an extra effort with our watering to make sure they stay that way.
Dinners have been amazing and we are becoming really quite versatile cooks with our limited ingredients. We have a heap of onions so Robbo made onion soup yesterday for starter (it has been windy days in more ways than one!), then Ana and Libby did an amazing vege pie for main, and then I made chocolate pear maddock for pudding (hope your proud mum and I did it off the top of my head without a recipe!). We haven't eaten that much since we've been here so all went to the beach with slightly uncomfortably full bellies!
We are really busy with visitors now and are booking up up to 5 days in advance. While this means we are rushed off our feet, its also really positive, the more people who come and see and see these awesome creatures the more we can educate and the donations can go towards further equipment.
Off on night duty again tonight looking forward to it. Had a quick hour power nap just now so will be up and raring to go by the time 8.00 comes. Think it will be another busy night tonight. Onto more pressing matters who can I 'borrow' a jumper off of tonight.......and who do I want to walk with (otherwise known as who has the best biscuit stash?!). Let the snooping begin....Kate xx
Saturday, June 20, 2009.Ana, Jimbob and Libby’s Cyprus extravaganza!
After much persuasion, a night on the beach and conversations like
this:
Robin -IF you go
Ana- we ARE going
Robin- but IF you go you will only see a goat. And it’s boring.
We finally set off on our little trip round Cyprus
Keco, our amazing and friendly neighbour arrived at the goat shed early and gave us a lift to Girne. (awwwwww) After arriving in Girne we took a very breezy Dolmus (bus) to Nicosia. Lovely views of the Venetian Walls, the ancient Sofia Cathedral and the courtyard of the old Inn. Briefly lost in a seemingly endless succession of carpenter stalls and staring men. Much ice-cream enjoyed. We crossed the border into the Greek side of Cyprus. Poor Ana “suffered much” with her Capeverdean passport as the security officers struggled yet again to discover whether this country actually exists. We immediately went to the top of Debenhams. This sounds an odd thing to do, but it was advised to us that the top floor had amazing views of both sides of the border, and there indeed was! Only tourist destination seemed to be the motorcycle museum though. We passed.
Following this was an epic, roasting walk in the sun to a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. Only to find that the very unhelpful tourist information lady had directed us to an obscure suburb of Nicosia. Thirsty, desperate and slightly crazed by the sun, a local woman rescued us when we asked for directions saying simply “get in the car” and then proceeded to drive us to the bus stop for Famagusta!! To use Jimbob’s words, the bus was “ all kinds of sweaty” and took a good hour. When we finally reached the city there were absolutely no signs to the centre of town, but by some incredible fluke, we managed to walk there by accident. On arrival we drank about a gallon of water and orange juice sold to us by a man who insisted “ go left, Nicosia, left at roundabout. Nicosia. Left”… and so on. There we saw many Ancient ruins and another mosque where we unluckily ran into the ticket man on the way out. We spent about 10 minutes laughing at the green peace cyclist dude (who’d cycled all the way through Africa, and was going on to Iran) who was struggling to understand why the same ticket man kept saying “one person two tickets”. We bought a Fez as a peace offering for Robin, and in the faint hope that he would give us the night off, after our pathetic 3 hours sleep the night before. This failed.
Night on the beach was a struggle. There were a couple of nests, but we found it difficult to keep our eyes open. However, as Ana says “After Happiness death is nothing!!”
Saturday, June 20, 2009. Dead loggerhead
I awoke this lunch time to find a number of missed calls on my
phone and a lot of banter in the goat shed about a dead turtle and
the press. Apparently a deceased loggerhead had been found on
Alagadi this morning and caused some commotion with the local press
and the volunteers after their mornings work on the North Coast. The
team had decided to bury the large adult female at the back of the
beach. With no pressing engagements this afternoon we decided to
unearth the girl to conduct an autopsy. We loaded her into the back
of the truck and carried her highly pressurised carcass into the
goat-shed garden.
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| Loggerhead Autopsy |
Obviously dead for some days, her bloated body was
hissing with gasses of decomposition, particularly notable was a
break in the carapace towards the tail where gasses and innards were
oozing, possibly a hit from a jet ski, as we are seeing these
increasingly at Alagadi. With the turtle on her back we removed the
plastron (ventral shell) and volunteers gathered around, close to
vomiting from the smell. We removed the lungs and analysed the
gastro-intestinal tract. The turtle certainly did not starve as the
stomach and intestine were full with over 2kg of decomposing food.
We analysed this and found the majority of the diet to consist of
sponge, with many shells from various species of crabs. We also
found tell tail remnants of whelks, the operculum doors that close
these shells off to predators, these were from large whelks the hard
opercula around the size of a thumb nail but the rest of the shell
digested. We found a small piece of polythene in the intestine;
clear evidence that litter on the beaches and in the sea is
affecting the turtles, though this was not the probable cause of
death, more likely the rupture form an impact to the posterior of
the carapace.
At weekends we see jet skis travelling at great speed up and down
Alagadi where turtles are aggregating to breed. Although no tags
were found on this adult female and she was not carrying eggs at the
time of death, if she had survived to breed at Alagadi she would
have been one of 16 loggerhead females recorded this season, so
6.25% of the 2009 Alagadi breeding population. We can not afford to
loose breeding adults like this and more needs to be done to prevent
jet skis and motor boats from illegally using waters off prime
nesting beaches such as Alagadi. After all Alagadi is the 5th most
important nesting beach for the green turtle in the Mediterranean
and is a hugely important conservation area for both species. An
exclusion zone around the designated "Specially Protected Area" has
been ignored for some years now.
We are conducting beach cleans on Alagadi every Monday and locals
have been getting involved. We also hand out bin bags out on Sundays
and speak to local bathers, encouraging them to take their litter
off the beach on departure. If people would like to help us on
Monday beach cleans we meet at the goat shed at 5pm.
Robin
This page is a mirror of a blog written by volunteers of the Marine Turtle Research group. Information about the MTRG can be found here.
For more information about the turtles of North Cyprus, their nesting and hatching, follow the links.