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 ...