Lorraine’s work experience travel log

Here is the Sea turtle season round up article I put together for the AIG website and public notice on Island. Ascension is one of the most important nesting sites in the world for the endangered green turtle (Chelonia mydas), with turtles nesting on Ascension between December and July annually. With July now upon us, we are now celebrating the end of another successful year of sea turtle monitoring. Between these months the AIG Conservation Interns conducted a combined total of 92 count surveys across Long beach, North East Bay and Pan Am Nature Reserves, with a total of 250 hours spent on the beaches counting and raking tracks and nests. The Conservation Interns conducted four weeks of nightwork across four months- deploying data loggers to record the temperature within 60 nests. The Interns spent a further four months excavating these nests to recover the loggers and observe hatching success on these beaches. As the sex of turtles is determined by the temperature inside a nest

As per usual the month of June absolutely flew by! With the 5th July marking 8 months since arriving on Ascension.  My view whilst typing up this blog!  June brought about the end of the turtle season, our last day monitoring tracks and nests and our last nest excavation. On the morning of the 6th June whilst carrying out a nest and track survey, Anna and I saw a manta ray swimming in the shallows of Clarence Bay (Long Beach) and it was one of the most magical experiences, I could have watched it swimming the entire day.  On the 14th June Dee held a Conservation Law meeting where she went through the relevant documents for conservation law on Ascension, I was really interested but unfortunately a lot of it was too confusing for me to understand, I find the way law is written quite inaccessible unless you’ve studied law.  Outside of work we started a girls volleyball group and have been doing weekly sessions on the US base; which is something I’d never done before and wasn’t