April Highlights - Ascension 2023

April Highlights 

A bit late to posting this one as it got very busy at the end of April! As April ends and May begins, the 5th May marks 6 months since I arrived on Ascension! How fast time has flown by! 

April saw us discover and obsessively use the Ascension Library (lots of books and dvds 😊), the end of turtle night work for 2023, Anna and I have carried on with weekly Zumba and completed the Dew Pond Challenge, and Nest excavations have also carried on for our second round of data loggers this month. 

In the evening of the 1st April our friend Matt was hosting an Ascension April fools Talent Show! The ‘inaugural long beach variety performance’ as it were. Everyone was really good sports and got involved. Matt started the talent show by playing a song on his guitar and we then had a range of performances from Sophie doing a recital, Thom playing a video game using a VR headset hooked up to a TV so we could see what he was doing, Nick’s comedy recorder playing around Ascension Video, Toby’s turtle cover of 1000 miles, the Hayes House girls were a Spice girls tribute act, Josh and Caleb played electronic guitar and drums as a duo, Matt also played a song on his keyboard, Simon did a shadow puppet show to Old McDonalds, Adam played his Ukelele and Abi did a Pole performance. Anna and I were the final act of the night, we had prepared dance impressions of everyone and put them together so there was audience participation involved. 

We wanted to get everyone up and dancing, so we got everyone to guess which person we were being based on the signature dance moves and once the person was guessed they had to join us on stage until we had everyone up and dancing by the end. All in all everyone seemed to enjoy and the evening was a success all around. 

Further notable social events of April were the 15th April – Pot Luck Roast dinner for Jonny before he went on his month leave to the UK, hosted at Matt’s house. I took cauliflower cheese made with the help of Anna, and it was a really perfect meal actually, everyone brought just the right thing, with no duplicates and just the right amount of everything. 

Hatchlings 

On the third of April in honour of my Mum’s birthday I spent the evening watching mass hatchling eruptions on Long beach with Anna and Abi. We had seen hatchlings peeping their heads out of the sand in the morning when raking, so we marked nests with stones and went back to them as the sun was setting to watch them emerge and head to the ocean. I’ll never get tired of watching hundreds of them all erupting in a frenzy and scuttling across the sand at high speeds to make it to the ocean. 

We also had a fair few hatchling releases this month, with the number of hatchlings increasing greatly as we enter the full hatchling season, if we find hatchlings in the morning whist raking that are stuck in a sand pit we put them in a bucket with some damp sand inside and a damp cloth over the top and keep them in darkness until the evening to release later – this is because there are usually lots of frigate birds circling in the day as well as triggerfish waiting to eat them when they enter the water, so we wait until the cover of darkness to release them. 

On the 4th April we collected quite a few hatchlings that needed to be kept until the evening, including one we nicknamed Squeaky! His/her jaw was misshaped so that every time air passed through it made a tiny squeaking noise was very endearing and adorable! Although after a few hours of the constant squeaking we were ready to release them into the sea. 

Easter weekend 

Easter celebrations on Ascension included a long weekend of walks, music and good food. On Good Friday (7th April) Anna, Abi and I went on a walk to Monty’s Bay for a beach day where I spent the day reading which was nice and chilled. 

On the 8th April in the evening, we went to the VC on the American Base for live music by Caleb’s band Seven Degree’s South. On Easter Sunday we all went for a BBQ at the AIG beach hut near Catherine point. Emily, Anna and Tiff all made Hot Cross Buns – so naturally I assigned myself the duty of being taste tester – and tried all three 😊 I decided they were all equally as good as each other, although different in their own ways. Then to finish off the long weekend Anna, Matt, Lorna, Toby and I went for an evening Shelly Beach letterbox walk and watched the sunset from Shelly Beach where there are anchialine pools with endemic shrimps. 

Turtles 

On the 13th April I got to satellite tag my second turtle. This time I felt more confident in what I had to do, but unfortunately it started to rain so Dee and Toby had to hold my rain jacket over my head to cover the tag and glue to stop it getting onto the drying epoxy glue. Otherwise, all went well, and we even saw some megalops and a mass hatchling eruption right by our turtle as we waited for the glue to dry. The turtle we ended up tagging was the 2nd turtle we had chosen; this was because whilst waiting for the first one we noticed she had prolapsed! She was still managing to lay but meant she was taking a long time to lay so we moved onto another turtle, but we named the first one Prolapse shelly. 

The 17th April marked the first night of our final week of turtle night work. Anna and I deployed all five loggers on Pan Am, with our final turtle being lovingly nicknamed SPAMELLA. On the 18th April we deployed four loggers at North East and still had one left which we finished on the 20th. 

Before nightwork at 21:00 on the 18th I was actually helping Lorna with the MPA YC Crab Tour, and I saw my first land crab twerking to release eggs into the surf of the waves. The twerking motion was a lot faster than I had anticipated! On my way driving 1223 back to the school to drop off some of the kids, the headlights of the land rover stopped working! Which made for a highly exciting drive back for the kids, but Lorna’s land rover went in front to look out for crabs in the road whilst I drove with full beams holding onto the indicator stick which was the only way any lights would stay on! I then dropped 1223 off at the school and luckily there was space in Lorna’s vehicle to drive back to conservation. We then picked up 1223 in the morning and took her to MT to be fixed. 

On the 19th April Anna, Abi, Emily, Lorna, Simon, Toby and I went to do the last satellite tag of 2023, which was also the last tinytalk deployment of Long beach as well! Then on the 20th April we concluded this year’s night work with our final nest on NE (turtle named Nebula) after our usual Thursday Turtle Tour. 

On the morning of the 20th, we actually also had a stranded turtle at Pan Am which had found her way halfway up the road to leaving Pan Am beach so Abi, Anna and I had to guide her back onto the beach and down towards the sea. She seemed a bit tired but eventually made her way back into the sea. 

Marine Team 

Back at the beginning of April one of my highlights was getting more involved in some of the marine teamwork. On the first of April, Anna, Abi and I joined Simon, Tiff and Dan at the Pierhead to take some measurements and data collection from fish caught by local fishermen. The first stage was to let the fishermen bring their catch onto land where they let us put a number label on the tail of each fish, we then noted the species, ID number we had assigned the fish and then took measurements of their length and weights before giving the fish back to the fishermen for filleting. Once that was done, they returned the fish to us and we reweighed it to note how much of the fish was being used, if the fish still had its gonads, we would collect a sample and assess the sex of the fish. We then also took a small muscle sample for stable isotope analysis and then if the fish still had its head attempted to remove the fish’s otoliths which are the ear bones of the fish and can be used to age them. It was a smelly but very interesting afternoon and I really enjoyed being involved in some marine sampling. 

Dive 

On the 26th April I finally went on my first Scuba dive on Ascension! I went with Marcos, Lorna and Adam and borrowed Sunitha and Emily’s gear. We went to comfortless after work and I was so excited but also nervous as it had been over three years since I last went diving. My last dive was in Greece when I volunteered at the Rescue Centre. It was just a shallow dive, but a good one to get used to being back underwater, I enjoyed being back under the sea and admiring the fish and being able to see further in front of me than in the UK. We saw lots of moray eels, triggerfish, stonefish, banded eel, St Helena sharp nosed puffer fish and porcupine puffers as well. 

Careers Fair 

On the 27th April I went to Two Boats School with Jo, Dee and Tiff to represent Conservation at the school’s careers fair for the seniors (but all age groups are allowed to attend). For my contribution I had suggested a skills game to get the students thinking about what skills and qualities are needed for certain roles, to see if they have any skills that match up, or any they need to gain to work in a certain job and to widen their horizons to job titles they might not know exist within conservation. I made job title name cards with images around them to help demonstrate what the roles do and then had pink cards with personal qualities written on them and yellow cards with learnt skills and qualifications needed and the students had to pin skills and qualities under job roles like a mix and match game. We also had a table with a biosecurity game where trays were full of clinker and had toy bugs in which the kids had to find and put into quarantine to demonstrate biosecurity, we had career flowers demonstrating different career paths people from conservation had taken to get to their current roles, a video playing in the middle showing different conservation tasks made by Lorna, Tiff had also brought some of the fancy marine team technology like the ROV, Shark and turtle satellite tags and microscopes with different things to look at under them.