Good morning turtle followers,
I have some good news, after a few days of no excavations, I am happy to say that we have got a Public Excavation this evening, with a 6:30 meet at the Goatshed before we walk you down to the nest.
The nest that we are excavating is situated in the middle of bay 3, and is another Loggerhead nest, and was laid on the 5th of June.
All are welcome to come join the excavation this evening, so we hope many can make it.
If you are unable to make it this evening, make sure you keep one eye on this blog, as I am sure there will be more hatching soon!!
Hope to see you this evening
Collsyxx
Friday, July 31, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Another Excavation Tonight!! - All are welcome
Good morning once again from the Turtle Project,
I have good news for those people who where unable to make the excavation that we had yesterday afternoon, as we have got another excavation on tonight. Again the nest that we will be excavating will be a Loggerhead nest, but laid by a different female. We will be asking once again for visitors to arrive at the Goat shed at 6:30pm, but we advise those who have a car to drive down to the project, as the nest we are excavating is on the second beach that we patrol at night, and we will be leading a convoy of cars over to the beach.
Hope to see you there
Collsyxx
I have good news for those people who where unable to make the excavation that we had yesterday afternoon, as we have got another excavation on tonight. Again the nest that we will be excavating will be a Loggerhead nest, but laid by a different female. We will be asking once again for visitors to arrive at the Goat shed at 6:30pm, but we advise those who have a car to drive down to the project, as the nest we are excavating is on the second beach that we patrol at night, and we will be leading a convoy of cars over to the beach.
Hope to see you there
Collsyxx
Monday, July 27, 2009
Excavation for the Nation to Night!!!
Good morning Turtle followers,
We have a nest, which we are going to excavate this evening, and all are welcome to come down to Aligadi and watch. The nest is a Loggerhead nest, and has been hatching over the last couple of days. The nest was laid on the 6th of June, and was the Loggerhead’s first clutch. She has so far come back to lay a further 3 clutches, which will possibly be her finished for this year.
If you would like to come down and watch the excavation, we ask all visitors to meet at the 'Goat Shed' at 6:30pm where we will then take you down to the nest.
If you are unable to make it to this excavation, we now have a telephone number you can ring, (sometime after 9:30am) to see whether there is an excavation that day. The number is: - 05338678188. From here you shall reach me (Lucy) and I will hopefully be able to say whether there is an excavation on that day.
Hope to see you at the excavation.
Collsy (Lucy)xx
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Excavation tonight!
We had hatchlings emerge this morning so there WILL be a nest excavation tonight. If you would like to attend please be at the project at 6.30 this evening!
Hay fights, hatchlings and backgammon
Good morning and welcome to another episode of the turtle blog.
I spent last week out West in a town called Guzelyurt. This was my first week of day-work in 8 weeks of night-work and I was desperate to get some sun. Every morning we’d wake up at 5 and go off-road to the West beaches where we would poke for nests, measure tracks and try on some of the random clothes we found washed up on the beach. Although it is supposed to be coming to the end of the season for nesting turtles, we still found a high number of nests on all of the 5 west beaches.
Out in Guzelyurt, the afternoons are your own so we wondered around town and made friends with some of the locals. We were taken on a tour of a nearby supermarket car park whilst Turkish drum and base blast out from the car sterio, invited for Turkish Coffee and challenged to a game of backgammon on the street. Eventually Heather and I managed to win 2 games to 1 (mum i hope you're proud), which didn’t seem to go down too well with our friendly Turkish man. Apparently losing Backgammon to British girls is humiliating! We also visited some ruins from over 300 BC and watched the sun set whilst eating home made (by Ainslie) banana pancakes over Monster (a particularly hideous beach). It was a very relaxing week and it was nice to see some more of Northern Cyprus, but its great to be back at the goatshed!
Last Monday we had our first public excavation of a hatched loggerhead nest. We all traipsed down to Alagadi 1 armed with weighing scales, tape measures and clip-boards ready to dig down for forgotten hatchlings. After a fair amount of digging by those enthusiastic to get sweaty, we found a number of hatchlings at the bottom of the nest, which were unlikely to surface on their own.
These hatchlings were weighed and measured and the number of hatched and un-hatched eggshells counted. We also opened any failed eggs to note the stage of development, this information is used in analyses later. Once all the visitors had seen the little loggers and the sun had become cooler, we released the hatchlings back into the water. Creating a line in the sand as a starting platform and using the sea as the finish line, the hatchlings didn’t know how much was riding on their being the first to the water! To everyone that was there, we hoped you enjoyed seeing the hatchlings return to the water as much as we did.
On waking after 9 tiring hours at the beach on Wednesday, we were greeted with ‘Move Hay Bales’ on the job list. At first this doesn’t sound too bad but on going round the back of the cow shed we were met with a pile of bales that seemed to reach to the sun. Three gallons of sweat, two hay fights and one hay rash later the job was done.
This week we also said goodbye to some of our favourite volunteers. Gill and Libby left on Tuesday morning and Emma left after a night of debauchery at 3 o clock Wednesday morning. We miss them loads and wish they’d come back. We do however have many new volunteers who seem to be getting stuck into Cyprus life. Josh and Henry came last week and just a few days ago Sean, Tom, Iona and Samuel turned up and finally Jim Bob has returned after just a few weeks. He obviously couldn’t keep himself away! Everyone seems to have settled in well, although we are starting to wonder if Henry suffers from narcolepsy or whether he’s just having problems adjusting to our nocturnal lifestyle.
Sam (now known as Other One Sam) would also like me to mention that it is his last week because apparently everything is about him.
Celli and Kim
I spent last week out West in a town called Guzelyurt. This was my first week of day-work in 8 weeks of night-work and I was desperate to get some sun. Every morning we’d wake up at 5 and go off-road to the West beaches where we would poke for nests, measure tracks and try on some of the random clothes we found washed up on the beach. Although it is supposed to be coming to the end of the season for nesting turtles, we still found a high number of nests on all of the 5 west beaches.
Out in Guzelyurt, the afternoons are your own so we wondered around town and made friends with some of the locals. We were taken on a tour of a nearby supermarket car park whilst Turkish drum and base blast out from the car sterio, invited for Turkish Coffee and challenged to a game of backgammon on the street. Eventually Heather and I managed to win 2 games to 1 (mum i hope you're proud), which didn’t seem to go down too well with our friendly Turkish man. Apparently losing Backgammon to British girls is humiliating! We also visited some ruins from over 300 BC and watched the sun set whilst eating home made (by Ainslie) banana pancakes over Monster (a particularly hideous beach). It was a very relaxing week and it was nice to see some more of Northern Cyprus, but its great to be back at the goatshed!
Last Monday we had our first public excavation of a hatched loggerhead nest. We all traipsed down to Alagadi 1 armed with weighing scales, tape measures and clip-boards ready to dig down for forgotten hatchlings. After a fair amount of digging by those enthusiastic to get sweaty, we found a number of hatchlings at the bottom of the nest, which were unlikely to surface on their own.
These hatchlings were weighed and measured and the number of hatched and un-hatched eggshells counted. We also opened any failed eggs to note the stage of development, this information is used in analyses later. Once all the visitors had seen the little loggers and the sun had become cooler, we released the hatchlings back into the water. Creating a line in the sand as a starting platform and using the sea as the finish line, the hatchlings didn’t know how much was riding on their being the first to the water! To everyone that was there, we hoped you enjoyed seeing the hatchlings return to the water as much as we did.
On waking after 9 tiring hours at the beach on Wednesday, we were greeted with ‘Move Hay Bales’ on the job list. At first this doesn’t sound too bad but on going round the back of the cow shed we were met with a pile of bales that seemed to reach to the sun. Three gallons of sweat, two hay fights and one hay rash later the job was done.
This week we also said goodbye to some of our favourite volunteers. Gill and Libby left on Tuesday morning and Emma left after a night of debauchery at 3 o clock Wednesday morning. We miss them loads and wish they’d come back. We do however have many new volunteers who seem to be getting stuck into Cyprus life. Josh and Henry came last week and just a few days ago Sean, Tom, Iona and Samuel turned up and finally Jim Bob has returned after just a few weeks. He obviously couldn’t keep himself away! Everyone seems to have settled in well, although we are starting to wonder if Henry suffers from narcolepsy or whether he’s just having problems adjusting to our nocturnal lifestyle.
Sam (now known as Other One Sam) would also like me to mention that it is his last week because apparently everything is about him.
Celli and Kim
Friday, July 24, 2009
Nest Excavation today!
At the begining of June we were called to the Acapulco beach resort to look at 2 loggerhead activities that staff had reported that night. With sunloungers across the beach and bright lights shining from the hotel complex we decided to relocate the two nests that we found that morning to Alagadi and last night one of them hatched. So today we are inviting everybody to come along to Alagadi at 18:30 to see the excavation of this nest and babies.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
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