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.
