June Highlights, Ascension Island 2023

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 sure I’d like, but I have actually been really enjoying it! 

On the 30th June Anna, Emily and I went to the NAAFI Cinema to watch Guardians of the Galaxy. Anna, Emily and I have also been watching Sewing Bee weekly and at the beginning of June. We received a huge fruit order from AIG on the 22nd June! Abi, Anna and I also did our first Kung-Fu gradings, and did our first and second yellow grading, and by the end of June we practiced our first take downs. On the 11th June we had a sea rescue BBQ at the AIG Beach hut which was nice and another notable achievement of June was starting and finishing the legendary impossible turtle puzzle (Started 4th June, finished 2nd July – with help from Anna and Toby)! 

On the 3rd June Jonny hosted a late birthday party (his birthday was in March) where he wanted everyone to come dressed as the opposite gender, all of the guys were planning on wearing dresses and we knew the girls at Hayes were going as the Village People. Anna and I weren’t sure what to wear so the morning of the party we went to the charity shop and found some matching ‘NO FEAR’ tshirts and long basketball shorts and decided we were going to be twin teenage boys who we named ‘Liam’ and ‘Aidan’. We had a really fun evening dancing to music and it was a really fun evening. Everyone really committed to their outfits and Anna and I had great fun pretending to be teenage boys for the evening. 

Turtle Work 

On the 1st June (after a day of Mexican Thorn) Anna and I ran an excavation session with the MPA Youth Committee. We had saved nest 14 on long beach to excavate with them as we hadn’t had any problems with turtles knocking over the posts for it. We returned to the office for just before 3pm and I headed to the school to pick up half of the kids whilst Lorna collected the other half and we drove down to Long beach to meet Anna who was waiting at the beach. We took the kids over to the posts around the next and explained what an excavation is, why we do them and what the stages we needed to follow were, including the measurements and data we were collecting. We then got the kids to help shelve the sand and dig the egg chamber once the cord was found. I also created a worksheet which we didn’t end up using. 

Whilst we were digging down to find the logger and eggs Lorna was taking the kids one by one to film a short video for world ocean day. 

World Ocean day 2023 https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtPUzwwLpZj/

A few of the kids lost interest in digging but three of four of them were really committed and interested and helped remove all the eggs from the chamber, we then got everyone to gather round to count how many eggs had hatched and watch the two unhatched eggs be opened. It was also cool to see their reactions and to make it even more interesting we had an albino hatchling as one of the unhatched eggs! 

The 16th June marked world sea turtle day, so Lorna came with us to North East to film some clips for a world sea turtle day video she wanted to make for social media. She did a few interview clips and then used the office drone to video Abi raking a track and us walking along the beach. 

world sea turtle day video https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ctj2a6JrT5i/

Then in the afternoon Abi, Anna and I went to Deadman’s beach to take down the turtle fence that we put up at the beginning of the season to reduce turtle strandings as it was starting to get very corroded and will need to be replaced before next season. 

With only a few nests each week and a few days of no nests here and there, Dee made the decision that we should end turtle monitoring, so my last day of raking took place on Pan Am on the 21st June and the final count of the season was done on Pan Am by Anna and Deigo that Friday. I can’t believe we’re at the end of the turtle season! 

June also marked the last round of nest excavations, with Anna and I doing the last excavations on North East on the 19th, Anna and I excavated nest 16 and 17 on long beach on the 20th and Abi and I excavated nest 18 and 19 on long beach on the 21st. on the 26th June Emily joined Anna, Abi and I to excavate our last nests on Pan Am where we found 4 out of 5 of the loggers, and even opened an egg that had twin hatchlings inside. Then on the 29th June we had our final excavation on Long beach, Anna and I went out in the afternoon and we weren’t too confident we were going to find the logger because we’d had problems with the posts being knocked over by other turtles early in the month, we dug around and found two other egg chambers that weren’t the ones with our logger inside and just as we were about to give up I found the cord and we managed to find our nest and perform a successful last excavation which was really exciting and a nice way to finish up turtle work for the year.

We also had three live hatchlings from the excavation to release in the evening, Carson, Anna and I released them and named our hatchlings Carl, Caroline and Vanilla. 

Marine Festival 

The Marine festival took place on the 10th June. Abi, Anna and I spent the week leading up to the marine festival crafting and helping create signs, decorations, play costumes and backdrops etc. for the festival. I’ve written a blog with more details about the marine festival here if anyone is interested 😊. https://laturtle99.blogspot.com/2023/06/ascension-island-marine-festival-2023.html

Marine Team Work 

On the 22nd June I had a boat day with Dan, Simon and Marcos. We were checking hydrophones placed around the island, deploying and recovering BRUVS, taking salinity samples, cleaning some buoys and checking some of Dan’s shark receivers. 

We started the day at 8am, packing up the fish truck and heading to the pier. The Richard James shipping boat had come in the day so we were able to get a lift with one of the boats to Moray which was moored up off the pier instead of having to paddle over. Once we were at the boat we passed over all the gear and then headed over towards comfortless cove and English bay area, stopping on the way to swap over a couple of Marco’s hydrophones, we swapped one out but the second one we went to swap out had actually come off the rope so Simon and Marcos said it would have to be recovered by a diving trip in the future. 

The hydrophones were attached to the rope with cable ties which had a buoy on the end. We also took salinity readings at these stops. When we got further round towards English bay we set up and deployed the five BRUVs (Baited Remote Underwater Video – however we don’t bait them here so they’re technically RUVs) we had on board, these included putting a Go Pro in each end, making sure the casing was closed, secure and facing all the way up. I then wrote down the date and number of the BRUV on the magnetic sketch board and showed it to the cameras as Marcos held them up, we then had to do a clap in the middle of the cameras to sync them and then the BRUV (Which was attached to lots of rope and a Buoy) was thrown over the side of the boat and the GPS location recorded. We then repeated this for all 5 of the BRUVs spaced out 100m apart. Simon also got me to wear different sea creature hats when I was holding up the board for the beginning of the videos which was quite funny. These included a Crab, Angler Fish, Frog and pirate hat. We then waited an hour before recovering the BRUVs. 

Whilst we waited for them we headed further round the coast and went to check some of Dan’s shark receivers to see how many detections of acoustic tags they had accounted for since the last check. We also checked when the last detection was and the orientation of the receiver. Recovering the BRUVs was tiring work, pulling them back out of the water! Once we had all five back we then went to deploy them in another area and repeated the process again. At around 14:30 we then headed back to land and Simon gave me the task of copying the video files from the Go pro onto the work hard drives. Overall, a really fun day, and really cool to be part of the deployment and recovery of the BRUVs as I’ve had past assignments at Uni where I was analysing BRUV video footage, so it was interesting to see the other parts of it. 

On the 29th June I also assisted Lorna with the MPA YC snorkelling session at turtle ponds where she had creating a game where she had made sharks, facts and answers and had attached half to weights and we put them in the water, the kids then had to split into two teams, take a question, shark or answer from the box and find the matching answer, shark or fact in the water. 

On the 30th June I also got the chance to help Marcos with his Acoustics project. Using the hydrophones he has placed out around the island he has been collecting recordings and wants to find a way to detect Grouper presence and absence so he has created a model to detect grouper noises from the recordings. He asked for our help to test his model by getting us to listen to the recordings, see where the model has identified grouper noises and mark any false positives or false negatives. I really enjoyed it, it was quite funny listening to the grumbles of fish underwater. 

Kings Birthday Party 

On the 17th June 2023 we were invited to the residency for the kings birthday party. There was a free bar (I was on call for sea rescue so I was on the fruit shoots) and lots of canapes. There was also 60% veggie or vegan food (apparently upon request of the king for environmental reasons) which was a huge plus for me. I really enjoyed the egg sandwiches, Welsh rarebit, cheese and tomato sewers, pea puree crostini the butternut squah crustini were my favourite! Anna was laughing at me because everytime someone offered us any food I took it and then I kept going over to the buffet tables to eat more. I was making the most of the free food! The only downside of the day was that I got stung by a wasp! I’m not really sure what happened but I was walking and felt a sharp pain in my arm and then saw a sting mark, luckily it stopped hurting soon after but I was very confused at how it happened. In the evening Anna and I went to the pier and watched huge crashing waves over the Pier before heading to Saints Club for some live music. 

My Day off 

I had the day off on the 23rd June and had a very nice and chilled out day. I woke up at half past 8 and decided to lie in my hammock and listen to some podcasts, I also made a small turtle model from a kit that arrived in my shipping. I then went for a picnic on Dead mans beach and reflected on the past 8 months before puzzling for the rest of the afternoon and then went to Volleyball in the evening and watched Shrek with Anna afterwards. All in all, a very chilled day off which was much needed. 

Letterbox walk 

We only completed one letterbox walk in June, which was Bird cave (25th June), Anna and I did Bird cave with Ben, Carson and Jonny. Luckily we had Jonny with us, because we would have never even found the start of the walk without him! I fell over on the way (which I think is the third walk in a row I’ve fallen over in some capacity and its becoming a habit!). On the way we saw the old clay pigeon shooting  with containers with all the old gear inside. When we reached the caves and the letterbox there were plastic flamingos to greet us and a few caves which we explored. I was worried they were a little claustrophobic but the one I went inside wasn’t too bad, Anna went through a really tiny cave tunnel which I was too scared to go inside. 

After the walk we then went to the RAF base at travellers hill and Ben had invited us for Brunch. It was so nice to have a huge cooked breakfast, I had scrambled eggs, fried eggs, veggie sausages, tomato, mushrooms, pancakes, croissant and a cup of tea. Very yummy! 

Plant work 

Now that turtle work is over we tend to help out plant team each Tuesday. On the 27th Anna and I had a plant day with Diego where we were doing the CRACAB plant checks and watering. We also got to go up some of the hills in the US base which have instillations on them as they seem to be some of the best places that the endemic euphorbia plants grow, and they need checking every so often. We hadn’t been up them since our first few weeks here back in November, so it felt like we were back at the start of the year again! We were escorted up the hills by the US security and checked the health of the plants up them. At the end of the day at comfortless watering site we helped Diego create some new cages for some of the new plants to protect them against being eaten by sheep. 

Park warden work 

Another thing we each week is help out with Park warden work, now that turtle season is over this is usually twice if not three times a week. And this month we helped out a lot with clearing the path along warpath.