Lorraine’s work experience travel log

One Month in! Today marks one month since I arrived on Ascension and the beginning of Week 5! To mark the occasion, it was also our first day of turtle work. As the nesting season will begin to pick up soon for the next six or so months most of my role here within the conservation department will be taken over by turtle work. Today Toby took Anna and I to long beach in the morning to show Anna what the tracks look like and how to tell the difference between a successful nesting attempt and a false crawl or bodypitting sand markings compared to a camouflaging sand patterns. As part of the turtle work we will monitor three of the major nesting beaches around Ascension, Long beach (largest nesting on Ascension), Pan Am (on the American base) and North East. We have a schedule of what beaches we will count tracks on and rake on for each week as there are too many tracks and beaches to count and rake each day so we will only be doing a small sample. On Mondays we will rake long beach and Tu

Week 4 -  Monday 28th November – On Monday Anna and I were back at letterbox to help out with seabird monitoring, but this time we were split up and Anna went with Sophie and Laura to help with the annual seabird census where they count all of the nesting masked boobies and brown boobies. I was helping Toby (the MPA Plastics Project Coordinator) with his new brown booby plastic study, which aims to quantify the number of boobies using plastic in their nests which they make. We were looking for nesting brown boobies, when we found them I acted as scribe and Toby carried out his data collection, he would first walk carefully up to the booby as to reduce disturbance and I would note the time he walked up to them and then the time he encouraged them off their nests, some of the boobies would stay close whilst he took a photo of the nest with a meter stick for scale, put down a numbered nest stone and took any plastic as a sample, I would note down the time he finished and the time the bo

Week 3: Monday: LetterBox 21st November On Monday morning Anna and I helped out with the vehicle checks and then headed out with Sophie to conduct seabird monitoring surveys at the islands endemic Ascension Frigate bird colonies which are situated on an area of the island called the Letterbox peninsula. Both masked bobbies and brown boobies also nest on letterbox but more to the left, and we were carrying out frigate bird monitoring so we kept mostly to the right of the where we monitored three colonies. The track road down to letterbox looked a bit scary to drive down, luckily Sophie is very experienced at driving it, but along the track masked boobies were nesting all over the track and she had to maneourve around them, at one point there were two quite close to eachother and Anna and I had to get out and guide her through the middle of them, I’m not sure how she made it through but the bobbies don’t move when they’re on their eggs so they just kind of made honking noises at her but