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Published: September 15th 2009
We arrived to the turtle project in Hawaii (in Guatemala, not in US!) on the 31st and stayed there two nights for ¨training¨. It is Olive Ridley turtle season but they also get some Leatherbacks during their season. The first night there, there was a nest of turtle hatchlings in the hatchery which we had to measure their lengths, record and then release the turtles on the beach by the ocean. They were so small, they fit in the palm of your hand, and surprisingly quite strong flippers. Typically once they hatch, they have a day or two to start eating in the ocean so we release them right away. We had to wait until every little hatchling made it to the ocean and a few were a bit slower than the others working out where to go... The books say only 1 of 1000 turtles make it to adult hood and the first batch we released had about 2 dozen. They were probably all eaten by fish.
We began the patrolling at 11pm, splitting up into groups of 3 or 4 and walking 1.5km up the beach and back again for two hours. We walked by moonlight as the
flashlights scare the female turtles nesting. We were looking for turtle tracks from the ocean to the beach where she would be nesting. We were competing with Palameros or turtle-egg poachers, locals who steal the eggs (legally in Guatemala) and sell them for food but are required to give a 20% donation or 12 eggs, whichever they want which is usually 12 eggs. Females can lay up to or over 100 eggs in a single nest, so they´d rather give just 12. Our first night, we found a palamero who had spotted 2 females close by. He was digging the tunnel to the nest of one while the other was digging her nest out. When the female makes her nest, it´s a hole in the ground about 40 cm and she just drops them in one at a time; the palamero, or whoever is taking the eggs, digs a tunnel to her eggs and collects them into a bag. The female either pays no attention to this or has no idea what´s going on because she carries on as normal (unless someone touches her body; shell is okay to touch- or if a light is shone on her) and she
Turtle Nests in Hatchery
The nests were numbered and contained 12-50 eggs eachwill even bury her empty nest as she does when she has laid eggs.
The palamero with his two batches of eggs let us buy them from him at 15 quetzales (a bit under $2) for a dozen. Then we bury the eggs in a hatchery, record the information and release them in 50-60 days when they hatch. When we arrived to the hatchery this time, there were over thirty turtles that had gotten out of their mesh cages surrounding the nests when they dig themselves up, we know what nest they come from. So we had to search for baby turtles in the dark in teh hatchery, record them then release them near the ocean, again having problems with a few very slow confused ones...
The next night, the teams were split up and our team went out at 4am to patrol. We found a female turtle on our own, collecting over 90 eggs! We took those back to the hatchery, buried them, watched the sun rise, then did a crawl count, which is wander the beach in daylight to find all the turtle tracks to see if the number of females found matches the number of
Nest Data
Taking temperatures and data of the turtles' nests turtle tracks on the beach. We also had to take temperatures of the sand in the hatchery, as eggs developed in colder temperatures tend to be males and hotter temps females.
We were quite lucky as in our first few days, we had seen everything there is to see with the turtle project, when other volunteers we talk to can go weeks without seeing anything!
With our ¨training¨ complete, we went to El Rosario, a small fishing village a few kms up the beach from Hawaii. Step and i were the only volunteers there; 2 Germans had just left volunteering a year there instead of compulsory military service. We stayed in a room that was rented out by a Guatemalan family and they also served us food. The days consisted of being very hot, sweating in hammocks while we read or passed the time, stopping at the family´s house to chat with them in Spanish and eat some of Eve´s delicious home cooked meals (typical Guatemalan food; rice, beans, tortillas, and since it´s a fishing village also had lots of fish, catfish and shrimp- always fried).
Our nights were dinner at 7pm then chatting with the family
for awhile, learning Spanish as well, taking a few hour nap, waking up between 2am and 4am depending on the tide (as high tide is the best), then walking up and down the beach (1.5 km one way and 0.5 km the other way) for two hours then doing the crawl count at sunrise. We never found any turtles. Once we found dogs eating something on the beach that turned out to be a female turtle who lost a leg in a shark attack and washed on shore, and another time we found a turtle, but no tracks and began to dig a tunnel to get the eggs when we noticed it wasn´t moving, we shone a light on it´s face and realized half it´s head was missing! We flipped it over and it was a male... with all limbs, so cause of death is unknown. Usually in the mornings there were a few egg donations from the palameros that found it the night before. But nothing too exciting.
After our week at El Rosario, we had to leave and begin our complicated bus changes to El Salvador. We want to spend some time in western mountain area where
Turtle
Female we found; she made a nest, laid her eggs which we stole and re-buried we hope the temperature is much cooler!
^Út Í Óvissuna^
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may nakano
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I've Fallen In Love
A bunch of us headed for El Rosario at the invitation of Fernando Rivera, the owner of a new resort there, Hotel California. Along on the same flight, the number and types of volunteers heading for Guatemala made my heart sing. Thank God for these good people. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of Antigua and Lake Atitlan and the pureness of the people we met. I got my cell phone stolen, but, oddly, I didn't care. At our final destination, El Rosario, I spent the most amazing week baking in the 100F plus heat on the black lava sands of El Rosario, hosted by the kindest people I've ever met, eating the most amazing meals of grilled freshly caught fish, boating on the river, and consorting with all sorts of animals of the resort and the surrounding villages. And the bonus: No mosquitoes nor tourists in El Rosario! Although the turtle season was long over, we saw the hatcheries and everyone had stories to tell. The education I got was priceless.