Lorraine’s work experience travel log

January has been a very busy month!  The week of the 16th January we hit hitting over 100 tracks in one night meaning over 50 turtles made their way onto the beach that night with over 40 nests counted for that night. We also started turtle strandings checks as we had a couple incidences of turtles being found stuck in rockpools etc. after trying to return to the sea after nesting and getting stuck. So on the 13th January we started our official stranding checks and had two turtle strandings on the first day!  The morning of the 19th January and 20th January also brought our first morning turtles or ‘dawnies’ as some people call them – which means turtles who are still finishing the nesting process when we arrive to count and rake. On the 19th Jan I was counting tracks at Pan Am whilst Anna and Abi were counting and raking nests and I heard sand being flicked and the heavy sighing of a sea turtle and looked up to see a turtle camouflaging her nest. I sat with her whilst she

On the 18th January Anna and I joined Simon for the monthly marine team light trapping Plankton sampling at comfortless cove, which is also paired with day sampling and is the same idea as moth trapping but in the water. Light trapping is used to Investigate the composition and abundance of zooplankton communities for ocean biomonitoring. This is because Zooplankton provide the foundation for all marine systems and are often described as “beacons of change”, as their composition shifts in the face of changing abiotic and biotic factors.  Extended temporal sampling of populations is therefore essential to establishing baselines of expected community shifts in the wake of intra- and inter-annual variability.  Light trapping also allows the collection of organisms which are often under sampled (larval forms) by attracting active swimming plankton and allows for collection areas where plankton nets may cause damage to sensitive habitats or be snagged on complex substrate e.g. rocky reefs.

Apart from removing bramble and guava from the restoration site up green mountain and clearing mountain paths, one of our most recent jobs assisting with the park warden work has been to put in way markers along the path of the letterbox walk Duck Pond as lots of people have been getting lost trying the find the letterbox at the top.  We joined Sunitha on the Wednesday 18th January in the afternoon where we managed to put in three out of the seven markers that needed to be put along the path. Judging where to put them based on where the most confusing points of the walk were. Once we got to a point where we thought a marker should go we dug a hole deep enough to put the marker posts in and drilled the way points onto the posts before filling in and compacting the ground around the bottom of the post. It was quite hard work carrying all the posts and the equipment but the area where the walk was is now one of my favourite parts of the island – the valley was so p

As conservation interns on Ascension, we make up the ‘turtle team’ and are responsible for all aspects of the turtle work. This includes checking for stranded turtles who get into difficulty when returning to the sea after nesting at night and might need some help manoeuvring out of a rockpool, or in more extreme cases might need to be unwedged from in between rocks/cracks. At the start of the season when nest numbers are slowly increasing we didn’t do stranding checks as there weren’t enough turtles nesting for it to be worth checking however on the 12th January we had our first reported turtle stranding and so stranding checks began! On the 13th January Toby came with Abi, Anna and I to show us the stranding check route which just includes Deadman beach, POL North, POL South and then onto Pan Am beach as its not possible for us to check every beach on the island every day – these beaches are the most common spots for strandings to occur. We are also in the process of buil

Turtle work started on the 5th December 2022 which also marked one month of arriving on Ascension! We were shown our turtle work schedule which consists of raking tracks and counting nests at three of the most important nesting beaches on Ascension. Anna and I practiced identifying a successful nesting attempt over an abandoned attempt. Since then, we’ve been raking/counting every weekday! Turtle nest numbers were slow to begin with, with one or two nests each day the first week, to over 50 nests per day on long beach in the new year as we look onwards to the peak which won’t happen until March! In December I also attended training for a refresher of my first aid qualification, which is always good to keep up to date. We had three days of training from the 12th December – 14th December by two lifeguards from Blackpool who were on Ascension for two weeks to deliver lifeguard training. On the evening of Wednesday 14th December Anna and I went with Austin to Northe

Christmas on Ascension: Christmas festivities on Ascension started the first week of December when the Georgetown Christmas Decorations appeared in the main square.  Carols at the residency On 07/12/22 We attended the first of the Ascension Christmas Traditions, the first celebrations of the Christmas festivities; the Christmas carols at the residency (the house of the administrator), which is located just under halfway up green mountain. Anna and I had spent the day clearing pierhead beach of weeds for the turtle season and then returned home after work to get ready for the carols. Ed picked us and Chrisna up around 17:00 and we headed to two boats for the minibus shuttle up the mountain. When we arrived at the residency we were greeted with mulled wine and eggnog as well as an open bar! The carols started at around 19:00 with a food break in the middle. We sung 20 carols in total, and it was quite amusing because there was not even a 10 second pause in between each carol,