Well, it HAS been a while and I promised to write more about the turtle work, and why I feel it is important to do, then, guess what, we hit that point in every season when the workload starts to escalate exponentially, usually around the end of July and beginning of August. That is because the first of the nests start to hatch (end of July) and the last of the adult females are still coming to nest (until just past the middle of August - last nest in the Messara this year was laid on 19th August).

Each nest that is laid requires regular checks on its progress and, once it hatches, on the emergence of the hatchlings.  After a short while the nest is then excavated to see how many eggs it contained and, occasionally, to free any remaining hatchlings.  Where nests are laid in places that are affected by light pollution they also have to be "shaded", which means building a narrow alleyway to the sea so that hatchlings emerging at night on not attracted by the lights, which are usually at the back of the beach and hence in the opposite direction to the one they should be going.

I think I was a little ambitious to propose more philosophical posts at this time of year with so much beach work coming up and, on reflection, I think I will return to the theme of why I am doing this work once the season is over.  Then we will be heading into the autumn and winter, which is a natural time for taking stock and reflecting on the year's events.  However, in the meantime, I would like to provide a link to a talk by Charles Eisenstein which he gave earlier this year in London, as I think he speaks to the deeper and more profound reasons why more and more people are being moved to take part in healing the planet (and each other).  I don't think I could put it in any better way.


a talk given by Charles Eisenstein

I saw this post on Facebook from my colleague and friend Smaro Touliatou, who has been working with ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece, for many years.  It made me smile as I recognised so many things that working with turtles has brought me too, so I thought I would share it with you. The original link can be found here.

Why are we coming back to ARCHELON every year… - 16/08/2012 "Well done, you are doing a great job, you are sacrificing your holidays in order to save the turtles".

Many comments of people we are talking to, look like that. However, I have never considered myself as someone who is doing sacrifices and by no means I am the saviour of the world. The motivation of conserving the reproductive environment of the loggerhead sea turtle remains strong but no lies here, someone must have found more things that keep him coming back to ARCHELON for 6 years and make him have the same enthusiasm with the first time.

So, why are we coming back every year?

- because when you help the turtles, you also learn to respect all the other animals...
- because we like to sleep under the shade of an olive tree...
- because we like to come face to face with turtles that have travelled all around the Mediterranean before coming to Zakynthos to lay their eggs...
- because swimming with a turtle is a the best cure for stress…
- because we meet people with the same ideas as ours…
- because we learn to appreciate simple things in life, like a glass of cold water after morning survey or a soft sleeping mattress...
- because we have no internet, facebook, TV or news from the outside world…
- because we see shooting stars during night surveys…
- because we like to dance without shoes, any time, any place…
- because we don't care too much if we discover a stain in our clothes…
- because we share our enthusiasm about turtles with tourists and local people…
- because we want our children and grandchildren to have the same experiences with us…
- because the contact with foreign volunteers opens up your mind…
- because as I am writing this article in the boat, I am looking back at Zakynthos smiling and
the rest of the passengers think I am weird!

Kostas Papafitsoros

tracks, tracks, tracks - a pictorial post

Things have certainly picked up since the last post - to the tune of 26 more tracks! There have also been preparations behind the scenes of materials for protecting the first nests expected to hatch from lights where necessary, and the first nest shades went out last week.

So, here are some pictures of the recent activity and, when I have caught up with myself, more detailed posts will follow:

By the way, here in the Messara we get some pretty ferocious winds, sometimes for days at a time, and this can create problems for shading nests from lights (more on that in the next post) but they can create some beautiful sand sculptures:

And, to close on a positive note, the first hatchlings have emerged today on beaches further along the Messara Bay, so not long to wait ...

Hot turtle summer

It has been a little while once again since my last post and I'm not quite sure where the time is going.  It has certainly been a busy couple of weeks, with what feels like a prolonged heatwave thrown in, and, yet again, more car problems.  The car problems, hopefully, have been solved and we now have a somewhat newer Batmobile, as our volunteer Sofia fondly calls it.

The day after our marathon digging effort in the last post I surveyed the 2 km or so of beach in the military airport, which is off-limits to the public.  I am permitted to go through there two times a week, so there is always something to see. On the second of July there were two more tracks with camouflages and, in addition, a false crawl - this is where the turtle has come up onto the beach but without making any nesting attempt.

The next day the action shifted back to Kokkinos Pyrgos with a track all the way up to the sea wall and a couple of nesting attempts with what looked like a possible camouflage.  Sofia, Katerina and myself investigated this very thoroughly but concluded that there was no nest there after all.  We have to make sure, though, because the lights and cats would pose serious threats to any hatchlings.

The 4th of July provided us with plenty of surprises.  Firstly, someone had tried to find the eggs in our first nest on Kokkinos Pyrgos and made a pretty deep hole in one spot but luckily they missed the nest by a short distance.  We were able to find the eggs again to check that they were undisturbed and replaced all the markers.  Quite why anyone would want to do that is beyond us but, so far, our only nest on Kokkinos Pyrgos remains protected.

 

Just as we were finishing our beach walk we then found another track where the turtle had emerged in front of a line of umbrellas and sunbeds but had then veered around them and found a spot where she had made what looked like a nesting attempt and possibly a camouflage.  Quite a few people had already walked over the area by that time but it looked sufficiently promising for us to dig.  The owner of the sunbeds suggested that we relocate the nest as he was concerned that children would 'play' with it and destroy it, but the law in Greece gives complete protection to Caretta caretta nests as an endangered species under international conventions so we were under no obligation to move it.  I also tend to think that removing the nest would do nothing to help children and their parents recognise the problems faced by sea turtles.  Given that loggerheads have also been using the beaches on Crete since it was formed in the late Tertiary (10 million years ago) when the waters of the Mediterranean began to inundate Aegeis, the land mass which was to become the Greek mainland and the islands of the Aegean, and they are fulfilling their essential needs, i.e. reproducing their kind, surely we need to find a better way to resolve such conflicts of interest - but more on that in later posts.

So the three of us started digging again, in somewhat hotter conditions than we would have liked, and we were helped by three children from a family from Thessaloniki.  Amazingly, and I think I will never forget this, looking for turtle eggs is not considered a particularly macho activity, so we had no help at all from the guys sunning themselves on the sunbeds only a few metres away.  Again, we found no nest but a big thanks to Tasos, Chara and Dimitris for their help.

Since that day not much has happened on Kokkinos Pyrgos but the tally of tracks and camouflages has continued to grow for the military airport beach.  There are very few lights there to cause problems and the beach is quite deep, so this may be why we are getting more tracks and nests there.  With little disturbance or lights to worry about we don't have to find the nest in every case in order to protect it but can simply mark the area of the camouflage with a ring of sticks and flags in order to keep it under observation until the estimated hatching date.  Once hatching is over, as with all nests, we can then then excavate the nest to estimate the number of eggs and the success of the nest.

By this time last year there had been more activity on Kokkinos Pyrgos but the next few weeks will likely see the peak in turtle nesting for this summer so I anticipate a busy time until late August.

One other thing hopefully worth mentioning: I would like to begin a series of some longer posts - perhaps once every one or two weeks - exploring a question which I am often asked, which is " Why are you doing this?".  Actually, I am probably asked more often "Are you getting paid for this?", to which the answer is no, my girlfriend and I are funding it ourselves.  But I think the two questions are somewhat linked in people's minds as perhaps it is assumed that any worthwhile activity that we undertake as human beings on planet Earth is measured by if (and how much) we get paid for it (I would have thought that the shady activities of the most highly paid executives in the current slew of financial and banking scandals would at least call those assumptions into question) - nevertheless these questions, and especially the first, are worthy of deeper reflection.  The reasons are many and various and, for the most part, seem self-evident from the perspective of engaging with life as but one part of the Earth's biological community rather than assuming a manifest destiny as the controller and dominator of the planet, but let's dive in and take a closer look.  I won't follow any particular logical progression but simply explore a different perspective each time which seems appropriate in the circumstances as things unfold on the beach over the summer.  The reasons will appeal both to those of a more rational and scientific mind as well as to those with a spiritual worldview, and to be honest I don't see a conflict between the two.  In fact, I may well alternate between them through the coming weeks and months.  I hope you will enjoy my musings and please feel free to join in and comment.

Wow, it's been a while ... not that there hasn't been alot happening.  First, let's have a cup of coffee and settle down (sometimes there is no electricity just when you need that early morning cup to get going):

The turtle activity has picked up - we had the first nest on Kokkinos Pyrgos, which I found together with Reggina, the Archelon co-ordinator for Crete, and Evalina, who offered to join in as we searched for the eggs:

I am also checking another small beach the other side of the fishing harbour.  It gets checked most days but I was away for three days on other turtle survey work (more on that later) and I saw something which could be a nest but the tracks were really faint and I could be imagining a camouflage.  However, with it being in such a sensitive spot - right next to a taverna - I marked it all up to thoroughly check it later with my new volunteers:

And here they are! Sofia and Katerina and I set to today and thoroughly dug the camouflage but ... we found no nest.  However, it's better to be sure.  Katerina goes back to Heraklion soon but Sofia has kindly offered to do some morning walks at Kokkinos Pyrgos while I am monitoring the other beach we have added this year and this will also give me a bit more time to catch up with other things (like preparing the nest shades for the hatching season).

Thanks again for the help Sofia and Katerina!

So, to the other beach.  It's an extra 2km which is not a public beach and which is an excellent site for the turtles as there are very few lights.  To be able to follow the population trend for the Messara turtles it will be really useful to know what is going on there so I now have permission to survey there two or three times a week, arranged with the help of Reggina. 

On our first walk we found five tracks!  It is not strictly necessary to look for the eggs here unless we belive the nest to be close to any lights or in danger for any other reason, such as being too close to the sea.  Some of the tracks came a long way up - we had one at 29m from the sea - but one nesting attempt was much closer, at only 11m:

We decided to look for eggs and found them pretty quickly:

It looks as though they had been there for more than 24 hours as the embryos have started to attach and the eggs were somewhat harder than in a fresh nest, and under those circumstances moving the eggs is very likely to endanger the developing turtle embryo, so we have left them in place.  The nest may be inundated a few times during its incubation, as we usually have high waves in July, but most nests can survive this reasonably well.  It's all marked up and will be monitored over the coming weeks.

Nest count so far: 2 definite plus several very promising nesting attempts, as well as the other nests recorded further along the Messara Bay by the Matala team.

Here turtle, turtle ...

A very strange start to the nesting season.  Not a single track yet on Kokkinos Pyrgos, although there are now 6 nests as of yesterday in the Messara.  At least it gave me time to deal with my other problems ...

So the car is at the garage tonight and hopefully will be in full working order tomorrow.  Thank you to my friends in Kalamaki for rescuing me!

I have been told of a track in the military airport at Tymbaki, so in due course I hope to speak with the Dimos about the nearby lights which could affect it if it was a nest (I don't have permission to go in to assess the track), and they were very helpful about this last year.

Other projects underway - I have just got hold of the first set of wooden posts which will be made into the new design of nest shading which I learnt from my contact John at the International Society for the Kissamos Area. More about this later - we won't need those until hatching time, so first we need some nests!

Still waiting on KP but ...

No tracks yet on Kokkinos Pyrgos, except for the seagulls ...

It seems to be a slow start - by 10th June last year we had had 4 crawls and our first nest but the good news is that today the Archelon team based in Matala just got their first nest - congratulations guys!

Interestingly, there may be a similar pattern over on the Atlantic coast loggerhead beaches in the USA.  The South Carolina United Turtle Enthusiasts (S.C.U.T.E.) reported on their facebook group yesterday that they had 35 nests as compared to 49 at the same time last year.

Let's see what the summer brings ...

The highs and the lows

There are many high as and lows in doing this type of work.  Being in one of the most beautiful places in the world is an obvious high, as well as participating in a small part of one of the great cycles of nature when the turtles come back to nest.  But sometimes we must accept that part of the cycle includes death.

So it was that this morning I found a dead female loggerhead turtle on the beach.  She reached her last resting place on a small quiet beach beyond Kokkinos Pyrgos and would have been washed up there late yesterday or during the night, as the waves were quite high.  There was no obvious cause of death but it is always distressing to see. I placed my tape measure over the longest part of her shell and recorded a maximum curved carapace length of 64.7 cm, indicating that she was still a juvenile, albeit quite a large one.  Not yet ready to nest for some years but she had still survived many years at sea until this summer.  We hope that we have many nests this year to keep the great cycle of turtle life moving forward.

Turtle time again, and first post

Just to start things off, here is the image from last year's turtle season at the Kataliki beach of Kokkinos Pyrgos which will always stay with me - we called it our Sacred Turtle Track (apologies for the poor photo, you have to look hard):

This is what is called a false crawl - our turtle had walked all the way up to the sea wall (bottom left of photo), turned around and headed back to the sea without trying to nest.  But what it had also done was walk precisely around an area we had temporarily marked with sticks which enclosed two nests - the bamboo tripod marking the one we had relocated from elsewhere. Even more curiously, it had made a very neat left turn on its way back to the sea (the up track is on the right of the photo, the return track on the left) to avoid bumping into the relocated nest marker. It felt like Kerstin and I had been given a message from turtledom about what we were trying to do.

No nests so far this year, but any day now ...