Turtles - Piro days and Peje nights

Hola!

Here in the Osa Peninsula, we do several types of surveys. We walk trails recording the primates we see (we have 4 types of monkey - squirrel, spider, howler and capuchin - all of which are threatened), we walk along the rivers looking for signs of otters (otter poo is bright orange and very smelly!), we sit at the lagoon recording all the birds, catch butterflies and we carry out turtle patrols.

We do the turtle patrols collaboratively with an organistation called Osa Convservation, who own the land we work on. We patrol one beach, called Playa Piro, in the mornings, looking for turtle tracks, new nests, predated nests and hatchling emergences. At night time, we patrol another beach called Playa Pejeperro (Peje), looking for all of the above and also for adult turtles themselves when they come up the beach to nest. Peje nights can be long - the first one I did we left camp at 7pm and didn´t return until 6am the next morning, but it all depends on how much you see. It´s nearly an hours walk to the start of the survey, then 4km up the beach and 4km back down. The main advantage of night patrols is that we can tag the turtles. We give them little metal flipper tags that have a unique number engraved on them, so that we (or other organisations) can record when they come to nest again, and where they nest again (although they usually come to almost the same spot on the same beach!).

We mainly get two species of turtle on these beaches, olive ridley turtles and pacific green turtles. It´s just passed peak olive ridley season so we´re now seeing less of them and more of the greens. I´ve still only seen a couple of green turtles, but they´re much bigger and more easily disturbed when nesting. On Tuesday I tagged a pacific green for the first time! We tag them when they´re laying, as they go in to a haze where they´re not very aware of their surroundings. Even so, I was told pacific greens are likely to flinch when they´re tagged and heard stories about them pulling out their tags as they feel it going into their flipper. This made me nervous, and although the green I tagged was awkwardly positioned so I couldn´t reach one of her sides very easily, she was very well behaved and didn´t flinch at all! It´s exciting to think that out there in the ocean somewhere, are turtles that I have tagged.

Unbelievably, only 1 in 1000 hatchlings survive to adulthood. That´s not even 1 in 1000 eggs! It´s hard to imagine that at about 100 eggs per nest, only about 1 of those in maybe 40 nests actually becomes an adult turtle. It´s really hard to believe when I see so many hatched egg shells and I´ve watched so many adorable little hatchlings wiggle down to the sea. However, it´s easier to believe when you consider an experience I had on a Piro morning patrol. We´d found a hatching nest and there were about 8 hatchlings left in the nest, so we set them on the sand to make their way to the sea. One was particularly lively and was nearly at the sea, in fact, the sea had previously washed up to above where the little turtle was. Centimetres from the sea, right in front of us, a cheeky black hawk swooped down and grabbed the hatchling in it´s talons! It was fustrating as we were trying to help the little fella to the sea and he was nearly there, but pretty cool to see all the same.

The downside of turtle patrol is definately excavations - excavating hatched or predated nests. They can be pretty maggoty, we often find dead hatchlings or even just parts of hatchlings and the very worst? The smell! But it´s all in a day´s work and I often think I´d still rather be walking down a deserted, idyllic tropical beach in the morning than any other job...