A bit of an update!

This is probably long overdue, but things are pretty busy at the moment. After 2 months with mostly around 6 or 7 volunteers, we suddenly have 10, and 6 more arriving in the next week (including 2 from Leeds Met!). This might sound like a good thing (and it is!) but they all need training, and writing the rota is a nightmare.

So on to the turtles...

Today we found our 19th nest, which unfortunately needed to be relocated. This can normally be done very quickly, but I had 2 new Greek volunteers with me which meant answering lots of questions! A good morning for training though! That nest, and a couple more tracks with swims and body pits meant they have now seen more turtle stuff than some of the other more "experienced" volunteers (one poor Danish girl hasn't yet even seen a nest yet!).

I'm very happy with the number of nests we have so far, at the beginning of the season I'd have been happy with 15, and didn't really hope for anywhere near 20. Now it seems we should easily make that target, and perhaps, with unmarked nests, we might get up to around 25. Last year there were only 11 on this stretch of beach.

We also put out the first lot of nest shades out this morning, our first nest, which seems like it was laid years ago, is due to hatch in around 5-10 days, hopefully before my visit to England.

This all meant that morning survey, which has been taking 1.5-2 hours, took 5 hours today! I'd promised I would go help Mel out on the first kiosk shift straight after MS, but now I will only make the last hour! What was worse though, is that the supermarket only had sugar free Milko. Disaster!

Myrtles Morning Survey

Hi All,

It's been a while, but I thought I'd share a few photos from a morning survey last week, I was walking the beach by myself, so thought I'd get a few snaps in too!
It was quite a busy morning, within 500m of starting the beach I found this:

It's an abandoned egg chamber. The chamber had lots of rocks in it, so I assume the female turtle decided that it was unsuitable - she then went back into the sea.

Not much happened for the next kilometre or so, but then I found this!


It is a pretty much perfect nest, with a distinct camoflage pit and camoflage. A short dig was all that was needed to find the eggs


The only problem however was it was far too close to the sea. If we have northerly winds here the sea can come very far up the beach, and this nest would be washed away. So I had to relocate the nest (with a little help...)

20 minutes later, and the 123 eggs were safely positioned further away from the sea.


Things are slowing down a bit turtle wise, we have been stuck on 14 nests for about a week now!

I'll try to write more soon!

John