07/12/11 A Curieuse Christmas

Although we have been on many turtle walks and seen 24 turtles, it is never boring. On one of our turtle walks, where it was just the two of us, we were recording the data from one nesting turtle. As we were doing this a second turtle came up to nest right where we were standing. A turtle has very bad eyesight out of water and is thought to be able to only see movement and shadows. Because of this, the second turtle started nesting less than a meter away from us. We had to stand completly still for 40 minutes until she finished digging and started laying her eggs so that she wouldn’t be scared away. Once the turtle startes to actually lay her eggs, she goes into a trance is less likely to be scared. The difficult thing was we were now stuck in between two turtles and we had to be careful to not scare either turtle.

Another highlight of the week was Monday. It was turtle heaven. While on one of our turtle walks we saw 4 turtles and the 3^rd one we noticed she was not above the tideline. We decided to relocate her eggs as we knew how to do this from a previous turtle. The funny thing was even after watching her lay her eggs and covering them, it took us an hour to find and dig up the eggs again. Thank god for the photos we took as this was the only way we knew where to find the eggs. After spending eight hours on the long turtle walk, and another on the short turtle walk in the afternoon, we decided to do a evening hatchling walk. Even though we were very tired, this was very special for us. It was our only evening walk and even though we didn’t see any hatchlings, we enjoyed it greatly and saw an amazing sunset from the boat. On this record breaking day we recorded 32 turtle activities, 13 more than our previous record.

The theme of our farewell party was Christmas and we had to dress up accordingly. We started by sitting on our boat in christmas hats, watching the sunset. We decided to come to the party as reindeer and we had free rein of Calum’s costume (a staff member). We dressed him in a mozzie net as an angel complete with foil wings and halo. We really enjoyed the dinner and loved the Curieuse Christmas.

07/12/11 A Curieuse Christmas