Baby Update

Hatchling update:

Our hatchery is well underway and showing no signs of slowing down. We get a few lulls every couple days from periods of time when we didn't have any mommas coming up to nest. But, on average we have been having about 3 nests come up a night!

39% of our nests have hatched

Our current success rate for our nests is at 89%

And we have released 2,253 babies back into the ocean

Thank you too all that have helped put our hatchery together and relocate eggs! It is truly amazing to see the work that has been accomplished in so little time.

 

 

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It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere

Lauren found the gallbladder.

Last year we started a tradition that we would release any babies that had come up during the day or from our exhumations with people in town at 5. I last left you with running to do an exhumation. Exhumations are when we go through the nests after they have hatched and count the egg shells and open any unhatched eggs to see what kind of development they might have been at. Occasionally we get one or two little straggler turtles, and these are the ones that I like to hold off and release with people in town.

So this year was no different. After our first nest hatched and we exhumed that nest and had one straggler I decided to pull up a nest where the babies had been poking their head out for the past hour to have everyone in town come and see what we have been growing in our backyard. I went running down our main road to go and let some of our locals and the kids know that we have babies and we will release the babies at 5 on the beach.

Glow stick jewelry making.

We had a great turn out at 5 PM and so many people we excited to see the babies that we had!! I was so excited that they were so excited!

As I noticed that the kids started to lose attention to the baby turtles I pulled out some glow sticks. We had a turtle release rave, or just jewelry making party. The kids left to go get some dinner and the adults hung out a little bit longer, before the lightning came in and they almost all went running back to their homes.

 

The Costa de Oro group

Today we walked to San Miguel for a Sunday Funday, hoping to watch a little American Football. The restaurant over there was technically closed because her help was sick, but she still made us food and let us know it would just take a little bit longer. We were not able to watch football but she did play it so we could listen. Maddie and Ana (a research assistant in San Miguel) came to join us for a game of apples to apples before we got our lunch and they headed off to their own meal down the road.

Piña con leche

We knew our walk back was going to include a swim across the estuary since the tide had been rising. This worked out to our advantage though because we were able to play in the estuary for a little bit before continuing the walk home. Don't worry everyone this is the estuary free of crocodiles and sharks!!

When we got back Lauren had a fishing lesson with one of our locals and Ryan ran out for a sunset surf sesh. We decided that it was a fun Sunday Funday.

Lauren and Santos wrapping up her fishing lesson

Ryan's sunset surf sesh

Our sunset was just to pretty tonight to pass up posting a picture of it

 

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By Popular Demand...

Last night I was awoken by Lauren walking into my room and just saying babies really loud and she walked out.

Costa de Oro's first experience with babies in 2013!

Yup that is right our hatchery is finally hatching!!! Last night we had one nest come up and today we have had some stirring in three more nests.

Here is one picture to make everyone happy. I got to go do an exhumation hopefully I'll have more pictures to share very soon!

 

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Redneck Muddin

What we watched happen over and over again.

Last year we attended the 4x4 rally in Coyote, and from last years experience I would not have gone again. However, I was convinced that this year was going to be better (mainly because we were not going to get there too early again), so once again I found myself tromping through a giant mud field. All in all I think it was a good $4 spend this year, I was actually able to see the people drive their cars into the mud pits.

The Costa de Oro crew met up with the San Miguel girls and we had a awesome time bonding with them. We were able to navigate our way through a ton of mud to watch some 4x4. After about an hour or so of watching people getting stuck we decided to venture off to the food venue to see what they had to offer for lunch. Luckily, we were able to find a spicket to rinse our feet off in because otherwise I think my sandals would have actually broken from the mud caked on instead of just almost unwearable anymore.

Eating with the San Miguel girls

We all grabbed some cokes from the bar and then went to the other side of the bar to take a look at the lunch menu. Unfortunately for Steph, the menu was not very vegetarian friendly, our options for lunch were such staples as arroz con pollo, carne asada, and a few other dishes. There was one that sounded like it might be vegetarian, we checked with one of the girls working and she said it was okay it only had a little meat. Steph settled for the arroz con leche, when we saw them dump a ton of whiskey into the giant tub of arroz con leche we knew we were all going to be trying it. Lauren, Teresa, and I settled on the pollo frito even though they decided to up the price by 500 colones right in front of us.

Luckily for us, we were able to all squeeze into a car from San Miguel and were able to get a ride up to the rally, which left us with a little more time to hang around check out some more muddin' (as Steph told us they call it in the South) and bond more with the San Miguel girls. While we were sitting in the dining area they were beginning to set up for a giant party they were going to be having that night with music and a DJ. Unfortunately the rally brings in so many people from out of town that we had to get home and prepare for patrol since we were expecting an above average amount of people on the beach.

Really good fried chicken

Since my last post, we have also received a new research assistant all the way from New Jersey. His name is Ryan and a total surfer boy, who brought along his brand new Al Merick. Like Lauren, he too has a degree in Marine Biology and decided that he wanted to come down to Costa Rica and work with turtles, I think the surf and that he has already been to Costa Rica twice helped to persuade his decision.

 

 

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Welcome October!

This is crabby patty, Lauren found the dead crab on a beach walk to San Miguel one day

It is hard to believe that I have been here for seven weeks and it is already October! Time sure is flying quickly this year. Some days I start to miss home but overall I am just a little bit too busy to really get caught up in it.

Roughly, I have about ten more weeks left to go until we need to be out of the house here in Costa de Oro. I'm not sure I am going to be ready to leave this beach this year. One of the locals was asking if I was coming back next year, he seems to think I probably will. (Michelle what do you think?)

A huge stingray that we kept smelling on patrol. The barb was huge!

Friday, we went up to the office to celebrate Elias' birthday. We were given an odd assortment of vegetables and told to cook something, right away I felt like I ended up on some foodnetwork challange. Lauren, Steph, and I passed the test though and our meal was pretty all over the board. W had green beans and broccoli with salsa de soya, roasted potatoes and zucchini, and sweet plantains with a onion garlic lime sauce Lauren learned to make from a Cuban restaurant in LA. I warned you the meal was all over the place. Of course there was cake. Elias loves to make different cakes, in fact his favorite book is 1000 different cakes from all over the world. This birthday cake was a strawberry yogurt with cinnamon sugar apple slices, it was an interesting assortment of flavors.

Prepping the mural to make a mosaic of trash

We are also getting ready for San Francisco Day, which is coming up this weekend. There will be a festival in Coyote celebrating the saint in which it is named after (San Francisco de Coyote). Apparently, this year it will be a three day long festival and we are going to have a booth where we are completing the mural that we started last year that will be a mosaic made of beach trash that depicts the marine life that lives off the coast here. Due to some bigger storms and some strong currants we experienced a ton of trash on the beach, so with the help of a lot of our locals we collected a ton of trash that will be put to use on the project.

Lauren was hard at work

October 8th will put our first nest at forty days in the hatchery. The first few days are going to be import for us since we will be able to gather a rough estimate on how long our nests are taking to hatch this year. Last year, we had an extremely quick incubation time of thirty-seven days. We've been getting a bit more rain this year though, so I am expecting it to be more around forty to forty-five. But since we need to be out of the house by December 10th, we need to determine this date pretty quickly so that the hatchery will be taken down by the time we leave.

The other day we got in a new volunteer, her name in Teressa and she will be with us for about a month. She's from Dallas and decided to come to Costa Rica, quit her job and sold her house and immersed herself in the culture for a month by going to a language school in Montezuma. She studied abroad here while she was in college and was excited to come back and if she can find a good paying job she thinks she might stay for a while longer. Teressa was also part of the Peace Corps and has an extensive list of countries she has visited.

I did find the Beinvenidos sign for Costa de Oro, finally after weeks of searching!

For our beach trash study that we are working on we needed to walk down to sector 3, that is roughly a little less than 2 km from our house. We gathered two large trash bags full of trash, and we are only surveying a 20 m of the whole 100 m section. Upon looking at the whole sector, we did realize we got lucky in the sections we randomly selected to survey for the day since a mattress had washed up on shore, the only outrageous thing we had to get home was an umbrella.

October is going to be a busy month here in Costa de Oro. We have a few volunteers coming in that will be staying with us almost to the end of the project (hopefully) and a new research assistant. Unfortunately, I am going to be loosing Steph at the end of the month though. Our house will be busy with volunteers and assistants plus (fingers crossed) tons of baby turtles. I advised everyone to catch up on their sleep this week because next week we might not be sleeping to much during the night.

We got a lot going on for me to organize this month, plus towards the end of the month I need to get my butt up to Nicaragua for my visa run! I did not have to do a visa run last year since I was in the country for about 97 days, but this year I am here for an extra month so it's either visa run or a fine, and I would rather go visit Nicaragua than pay the Costa Rican government $100. Sounds like a vacation, but I have heard that it is not stop traveling plus I want to try and explore as much of what I can of Nicaragua while I'm there.

 

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Tortugitas Verde

We had a pretty exciting start to our week with the unexpected exceptionally successful hatch rate of our relocated green nest on the beach. We had a green turtle nest in Costa de Oro about a week before I got here, bummer for me that she did not come back to renest because I really wanted to see her. Because the hatchery was not finished yet the eggs were relocated closer to our house so we could keep a close eye on them. Upon my arrival to Costa de Oro, I think, this was one of the first things that Hilary showed me. Last week, I knew the due date was quickly approaching and so I asked Lotti what the protocol was. She had me go home and find the nest (Hilary, the log got moved because they were no where near the log). Maddie (our project supervisor) and Wilson (the local coordinator in San Miguel) came over to help me check on the nest. We opened it up and weren't sure what to expect, the nest seemed really cold but thought we would give it a few more days.

Baby Green, so adorable and extremely feisty (photo credit: Lauren)

Lotti came by a few days later and we went to have a peak in the nest. We triangulated the nest and I started to dig. Because the nest had been cold a couple days before I was not really expecting to find any turtles in it. So, needless to say, it was an awesome surprise when I was digging down into the nest and felt a turtle! It scared me at first and I jumped back because I was not sure what I felt, after digging around a little more I realized it was a baby turtle.

 

Lauren and Steph were sent running back up to the house to grab gloves, a bucket, and obviously a camera! I started pulling babies out of the nest and while I was trying to count I just got to excited and totally lost track. I ended up putting on another glove and we did the exhumation right on the beach so that Lauren and Steph could see.

All the baby greens! (photo credit: Lauren)

During an exhumation we count the amount of egg shells and take a look at the eggs that did not hatch to see why. Lauren and Steph were able to see one stage 1 development egg, with a sweet baby fetus in it, and a stage 3 baby as well. Since my hands were a tinsy bit gross from playing in undeveloped turtle eggs Steph and Lauren were dubbed the turtle photographers. (Have not stolen any pictures from Steph, yet, so these photos are all compliments of Lauren). Our hatch success was at 88%, which has definitely pumped me up for our hatchery to begin hatching!!!

 

 

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Eggs in the Sink

Our turtles have been up to some weird things this season. We are finding up tracks with no down tracks and down tracks with no up tracks, only guess is that people are moving turtles! Who does that?! One of our morning poachers has begun participating in morning census' with us, and when we find a nest that has not been poached he will find the eggs and we get to put them in the hatchery. The other night all of our turtles came up in the same sector, I wish it was all at the same time that would have been fun, exciting, and overwhelming!

Lauren making the nest and counting eggs

Well, we are just going to keep adding to the weird things that our turtles are doing. Yesterday morning Steph went out to do some laundry and I hear her shouting at me why I put eggs in the sink...

My thought process: Hmm weird I didn't make eggs for breakfast and I am pretty sure Lauren didn't leave her egg shells in the sink I don't know what you are talking about.

So I got up and walked over to the sink where we wash clothes. THERE WERE TURTLE EGGS IN THE SINK!! Some one left us a gift, we were really confused on where they came from. Right away I called Maddie just because I wanted to make sure that they were going to be safe to put in the hatchery. Figured it was a pretty rainy morning that it should be fairly safe to put the eggs in and they are hopefully fine. Well 78 eggs later we added the fourth nest for the night into the hatchery and I enjoyed writing Sector: Sink on the tag. We label all the nests in the hatchery with the date they were found, number of eggs, and from which sector so we can release babies as close to where their nest was.

Here is an example of the tags that we tie to the hatchery grid so we know where the nests are.

We did find the mystery man that left us the eggs. Steph saw our friendly morning poacher this morning on her census walk and asked him about the eggs. He had found them and brought them by the house, no one was there because people that were here were asleep and Lauren and I were on the beach. So he had left them for us in the sink. WHOA bad guy turned good?! I'm not complaining though, I will take poachers delivering us eggs any time!

I have not posted any number so far this year on nesting events, nests relocated to the hatchery, or the amount of eggs collected. I figured since this post is dedicated to all the weirdness we have been expereincing with odd nesting behaviors that now would be a good time to introduce some of our numbers, which I am really excited about since the hatchery was just finished about a month ago.

TURTLE TRACKER 2013

NESTING EVENTS: 90

NESTS IN THE HATCHERY: 24

EGGS IN THE HATCHERY: 2,314

BABIES TO COME SOON!!!

 

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Character Update

So I know that on my last post I referenced Lauren, and a lot of people were probably like "who is this girl?" Well, now that it is not three in the morning and I am finally getting a chance to sit down and write some updates about what has been going on let me explain.

Meet Lauren

Lauren is someone I went to high school with. Last year when I got home she approached me and expressed how much she LOVED sea turtles and wanted to do what I did, go to Costa Rica and work with sea turtles. Once I found out I was coming back I contacted her and let her know that they were looking for volunteers so they might be looking for research assistants too, and they were! So now I have Lauren from Camarillo here with me. She went to Cal Poly SLO and has a B.S. in Marine Biology. Last year, she began to get the urge to travel which began her journey. She spent a month working with elephants in Thailand (which I am now seriously considering) and ventured off to Europe to participate in different World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), and spent four months traveling to different farms in Europe (talk about a smart way to travel!). Needless to say, it has been awesome having someone from California around that gets all the references I make. PLUS, she will be here until December, but I lost her as a travel buddy since the airline made her book a flight back on December 10th (the day our project closes).

My weird Costa Rican Rash.

Not only was I excited for Lauren to arrive last week because I was excited by the overwhelming representation of California in the house, but she was also bringing goodies from home. Dad sent her with a new headlight (we have been having issues with lights breaking this year so better safe than sorry), a new watch since my had been having issues the week before and I freaked out thinking it was broken (but it still works), some hydrocortisone itch cream (have not made it to Jicaral to pick up da'kine with lidocaine yet), and some antifungal cream because I got a weird rash on my arm and wasn't sure what it was. She was also given ginger cut candies to bring down, however, did not have room in her bag so they didn't make it (hope you are enjoying those Mrs. Seguey!).

Over the past week we also had Mainor stay with us for a few nights. He is a Costa Rican who is hilarious to have around. We played lots of card games, bringing UNO might have been the best choice I have ever made.

Steph, Lauren (who is kind of hiding), Mainor teaching Santos how to play UNO

This is how I know my Spanish is improving. One night on patrol with Santos I was talking about how much I love cheese and milk, after patrol I thought he might be bringing me some fresh milk but I was not quite sure. A few days later her showed up at the house with a jar of fresh milk for me!! AWESOME!! It has been a treat to have real milk, though I am a little sketched out on just drinking it straight or having it in a bowl of cereal. He did say that in a month they would be milking the cow again and I can go with him to learn, it would have to be on my night off since it would probably be like 2 or 3 am but I think I might take him up on the offer. I think it would be fun to learn to milk a cow even if I don't really end up getting the night off.

 

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Sunny Day Pictures

 

 

 

 

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Sunny Day Pictures

 

 

 

 

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My Living Arrangements

My bug net, blanket from Courtney, and a clothes line strung across my room

Returning to Costa Rica did receive some upgrades this year. No, unfortunately I do not have hot water or a laundry machine this year, that would resort living, though I do have my own room and bathroom.

My closet/towel rack, the bathroom doesn't get much ventilation and no one wants mildewy towels

I cleaned and organized it all the other day so I thought since it was the first time I had really organized everything I should take a picture so everyone can see my room this year. I have a bigger bed than I do at home and my own bathroom. Maybe I should stay here at the end of the season (even if the house gets rented out I will just come with the house). Even though I have my own toilet, it is broken, so it is like it doesn't even exist. At one point when our has had 6 girls we were all using one bathroom for the toilet, needless to say that was a mess. I am happy that at least my shower works and that I can store my toiletries in the bathroom and not worry about my toothbrush falling to the ground.

My bathroom, it is nice having my own space, but the toilet has been broken for a month

 

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