One Month on Ascension! Turtle Work Begins!

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 Tuesdays we will count tracks and nests and rake long beach. Wednesday we will count on long beach and rake Pan Am or North East (alternate each week) and then Thursday count and rake at either Pan Am or North East and then Rake Friday. We will also take a GPS of any new nests and a GPS track of the strandline/high tide line each day we’re out on the beach. There was only one nest on long beach today so we only had one to rake but it will get very busy soon!

 

Whilst we were out on the beach we actually were lucky enough to see around 30 sea turtles all in the sea! So many mating pairs and mating turtles floating around! It was incredible to see and I was very excited. They were also Anna’s first ever turtles she has ever seen so it was even more exciting. I practiced more driving today and after Long beach we headed to Pan Am to see if there was any turtle activity there. There were three lots of tracks there but it was good to get a feel for the route we will check when it gets busy in the season. Toby also showed us where we will go to do turtle stranding checks, which will begin in January. After we returned to the office Anna and I went back to the Bungalow and then went to pierhead beach to continue weeding the beaches ready for the rest of turtle season! After work we headed to the Georgetown sea water pool before dinner to relax.