A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER'S TAKE ON TURTLE CONSERVATION IN COSTA RICA

This is an old post that never made it to my travel blog. My daughter and I went to Costa Rica in 2017 and stayed in a really gorgeous though remote part of Costa Rica, on the Pacific Ocean side, working with a turtle conservation group. The location was in Playa Junquillal and the organization was Asociacion Vida Verdiazul. We wanted to do a volunteer project somewhere (no particular destination in mind) and decided to go through a company called International Volunteer Headquarters - IVHQ. We had a great time and did some good work. This is a post I wrote for IVHQ.

Here’s what to expect on a Turtle Conservation volunteer project with International Volunteer HQ: Meg Stewart and her daughter Tillie recently joined us in Costa Rica and they’ve decided to share their experience…

My daughter and I wanted to do an international volunteer project together this summer. I am a teacher and I have summers off and my daughter is 16 years-old so couldn’t go on one of these volunteer programs alone. She is fluent in Spanish so I was set on going to a Spanish-speaking country. We looked at all sorts of volunteer organizations and kept coming back to IVHQ, with the primary reason being a wealth of well-made videos showing what projects are available and what we might want to do. We decided on turtle conservation in Costa Rica.

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Turtle Beach

We moved temporarily to Barbados on September 1 last year. The apartment is nearly right on the beach. We feel very fortunate. It took me awhile to realize that not only do we have access to one of the most beautiful beaches on the island with swimming in Caribbean blue water but we have turtles.

In the first month we would snorkel and see what looked like discarded ping pong balls strewn across the reef that is our backyard. We'd pick them up underwater, bring them to fresh air and realize that these were not athletic equipment but some sort of egg. Then we went on a turtle patrol walk along the south coast of the island. We saw hundreds of baby turtles and one turtle track. Still, I did not think of our beach as a turtle nesting beach. Plus, I knew what a marine turtle track looked like because we became fascinated with Leatherback turtles in Trinidad a few years prior. It was not until November when turtle hatchlings came scurrying up from the sand on our beach that I understood the magic that we have on this beach. They've been here nearly the whole time. Certainly we see sea turtles when we are snorkeling but they've been nesting and hatching throughout most of our time here.

Yesterday when I went for a morning run I saw eleven turtle tracks along my usual route. That was more than usual. Today I saw just two, but the point is there are tracks and nests every morning. Here are two from a couple of weeks ago.

When you come to Barbados, wake up early and take a walk along the beach and you will see the tracks. Most beaches enjoy frequent visits from nesting turtles, I'd say from May to October. It's best not to walk up to a nesting turtle, shine a flash light (or torch) on her, or scare her in anyway. If you see hatchlings, feel lucky! But let them make the journey to the sea on their own; don't help them, they need to feel the sand and stretch their legs because they have their work cut out for them.

These turtle shots are from my Flickr account.

Hawksbill Turtle Tracks

School is out for the summer and now we find ourselves heading down to the beach a little earlier in the day. This video was taken at about 7 am yesterday. I went out for my run in the morning and saw a lot of Hawksbill turtle tracks and nests but these two were right in our back yard. I had to bring the kids down to see them.

I love living here. We're going to miss it.

Don't Miss the Jammin' Catamaran Cruise

We live in paradise for a year, did I mention that? When you live in Barbados, you get some company from folks living in cold and foreign lands. With all of our friends who have left the chilly northeast to come visit us, we take them on a real treat - the Jammin' Catamaran cruise which sails around the west coast of Barbados. The video below will give you a sense of the atmosphere - music, limin', happy people, fun in the sun as well as in the water. If you're really lucky, when you're on your Jammin' cruise you'll get to see a few sea turtles.

On one Jammin' trip, I overheard the owner/captain Roger say to one of his crew members "give the people what they want!" and Jammin' does do that. Then they passed around a pitcher of Jammin' Rum Punch. Nice!

































Jammin's web site: http://www.jammincats.com/


All the photos shown here are on my Flickr page.

Hello, Good Day! More Sea Turtles

I got home from work to the excitement of the family finding baby turtles in our "backyard." They found about twenty five Hawksbill turtle hatchlings and encouraged them to go to the sea where they belong.

Only one of the hatchlings was left by the time I got there and that's what you see on the video below and in my photo to the left. The kids, again, had another turtle episode in their lives. Now, it seems we live on a beach where the turtles have been nesting (though the season is over) and the babies are starting to hatch, so we may have more turtle saving and chasing yet to come!

Hello, Goodnight! Turtle Watching in Barbados

I had the great opportunity to go on a turtle watch walk with CERMES graduate students, led another PhD student, Darren. Darren is a marine turtle expert and works for the Barbados Sea Turtle Project. I mentioned Darren's terrific guest lecture previously.

Our walk and turtle watch was part of the turtle watch program going on all around Barbados while the marine turtles are nesting, from June 1 to the end of October.

We met up at 8:30 pm and were out until past midnight and on our watch we saw a single hawksbill turtle track (a failed attempt of the nesting female to come on land and nest). Darren also got a call that a hotel found some hatchlings running towards and into the

hotel. These hatchlings should have been running towards the sea but they get confused by the lights of all the developments in the area and ran towards the brightest thing they saw. In pre-development days, prior to all the hotel and fast food lights, the turtle hatchlings ran towards the brightest thing they saw, which was the sea reflecting the moon's glow. We let out the little turtles near to the shore, in a darker part of the beach and they scampered to the sea. It was so sweet.

In 2003, in my pre-bloggings days, we lived in Trinidad for six months. We trekked out to Grande Riviere to watch the leatherback turtles nest and we all fell in love with these giants of the sea. Towards the end of our (first) Caribbean stint, we went back and saw the babies come up out of the sand. We had no idea what we were doing and there wasn't really a research agenda going on in Trinidad, at least as far as I can tell. I will say, though, that there were turtle guides. We were strongly discouraged from going out on the beach to look at the leatherbacks on our own. We were told not to use flashlights unless we were told that it was okay. The flashlights spook and annoy the nesting turtles and she may not lay her eggs. We signed up for a turtle guide and we were told to go to sleep "and we'll wake you when we see a turtle." I can still remember the lovely sound of the guide waking us up with a gentle "hello, goodnight, we have a turtle."

The first two photos I took last night and these last few I had

to move over to my Flickr account, I took them in 2003 in Trinidad.

This is sleepy Caleb, all of five years old, posing with a

leatherback.

Caleb woke up very early to try to spot a hatchling and he did! he came running back into the room shouting with glee.

Caleb and Tillie (almost 3 years old here) with a bucket of turtleback hatchlings.

A nesting leatherback, after laying her 100 or so eggs, going back to sea.

Good and Full Day

Today was a pretty great day. I had a very nice morning getting some minor things cleared out of my to-do pile and then met the CERMES technology support person, Dale. Why should that be so terrific? He came by my office to familiarize me with the UWI and CERMES system and see what I might need, technologically speaking. There was a nice matter-of-fact calm about Dale. What was interesting to me, as someone coming from the IT sector in higher ed, is that he is a dedicated staff member for the CERMES program. He doesn't need to be the expert on a variety of software packages or the campus Learning Management System. He supports the use the desktop machines, the computer labs, the projection (from what I can tell), and the campus (or CERMES) server access. It was great working with him. He’s going to load ArcGIS on my desktop machine, plus the extensions I need. I don’t have to do it. Just today, prior to meeting this technology support specialist, I tweeted something not too kind about IT professionals, after reading an article on IT staff and “the way they are.” I have to be a little kinder about the IT support folks.

By the way, I did NOT take any of these photographs. The hawksbill turtle (first photo) is from the Bienvenidos a Bajatortuga site . The leatherback turtle (below) is from Gabriel Malor's blog.

In the middle of being shown the technology facilities at CERMES, a professor came out of a lecture room and said to me and Dale, “there’s a talk on turtle in there. Do you want to learn about marine turtles?” Why yes, I’d love to learn about marine turtles, especially in Barbados. I sat in on a fantastic guest lecture from someone from the Barbados Sea Turtle Project. I learned all about hawksbill turtles (above, in water), green turtles, and leatherbacks (the one in the sand), who seem to be nesting in Barbados right now. I know a bit about leatherbacks from our time in Trinidad. All of these amazing sea turtles are engendered in some classification or another. I hope to be able to participate in a field trip with this same lecturer and the students in the class when they go out to monitor turtle nesting in the near future.

I had to sneak out of the turtle discussion to meet with my new colleague Kim for a planned meeting to discuss her Grenadine MarSIS data. Kim is a PhD candidate at CERMES who is heading up the Grenadine MarSIS project which is a “multi-knowledge Participatory GIS (PGIS) which integrates a range of transboundary information on marine resources, biodiversity and ecosystems of the Grenada Bank together with the social and economic aspects of marine resource use patterns and corresponding activity profiles of its users.” It’s an amazing geospatial, space-use analysis project that I will go into more discussion about over the coming months. I’m working on the Google Earth and web mapping integration of Kim’s collected data. Kim’s blogged during her recent, and final, reach vessel outing, which you should check out.

Scooting out of the meeting with Kim to make another meeting, this time with the Chargé d'Affaires ad interim at the U.S. Embassy to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean. I met Dr. Brent Hardt, we chatted about the Fulbright and what I will be working on, he met my family, we shook hands and took a picture, not with my camera. It was brief and yet, very exciting to be taken so seriously. I also got to meet the person at the Embassy, Juanita, who has been helping me all along the way, after I found out I received the Fulbright award. Juanita’s assistance prior to coming to Barbados was invaluable and helped make the transition very smooth. Oh, one more thing that my family and I got to experience at the Embassy, a security briefing. It got us a little nervous, though it is always wise to stay alert and be sensible. Afterwards, I felt protected. No pictures from my own camera, though. Drat. The photo is of the US Embassy in Barbados and is grabbed from the Embassy's web site. I couldn't take my own photo.

Finally, we ended our evening with a shabbat service at the Shaare Tzedek synagogue. There are about sixteen Jewish families who are members of this congregation (the only Jewish congregation on Barbados, I believe) and for the next 11 months, ours is family number 17. Services were held in a home made into a sanctuary found in a neighborhood. It was lovely. The photo below is from this Jewish Virtual Library site.