Morning Walk

The start of Morning Walk

One of the easier, cushier jobs that we might get is Morning Walk - the patrol that walks the entire length of the beach at 5AM. The walk goes from marker 6 down to the end of South at marker 36, then back to the end of Ventana at marker Ventana 11 - a total of about 6 miles - to check for any turtles that may have nested in the hours between the last patrol and dawn. The people who get the MW shift get to have a full night's sleep, usually from around 8PM until 4AM - HEAVEN!!

Yesterday, I got the Morning Walk shift, which means I finally got a full night's sleep. Mili, biologist Janelle, and I set off in the dark, and for the first time since we've been here, we saw the moon (it rises around 5AM).

We began by walking down the beach towards Tamarindo, looking for signs of an adult turtle that had come up and nested, or of smaller tracks from hatchlings who came up from the sand and crawled to the water. We started by walking quickly down the wet sand in order to catch any stray turtles, which is much easier than walking on dry sand. But on the way back, we kept to the high-tide line, where the sand is softer and walking is much more difficult. It definitely makes for a buns-of-steel workout!

Halfway back to the hatchery, we found a new olive ridley track:


This project is in the care of the Leatherback Trust, so the patrols are timed specifically for leatherbacks - we walk down the beach for 20 minutes, rest for 20, then walk back for 20. This means a spot on the beach can be monitored every hour, thus catching every leatherback (they take well over an hour, often 2 hrs, to nest). Olive ridley and black turtles, on the other hand, nest much faster so we often see them when they are returning to the water, or miss them entirely and know about them only by their tracks.



We recorded the location of the nest, noting the distance from vegetation and closest location marker before continuing down to Ventana.






During my Ventana night patrol, we'd seen a huge migration of hermit crabs. Hundreds of crabs were crawling up out of the water - it was nearly impossible to continue on without stepping on one. Biologist Collin said he sees that phenomenon there quite often. Janelle thinks that because the location is almost always in front of one of the beachfront properties, it may be because there is a sewage leak out of the house and the crabs are there to feed. Basically, she was saying we were walking over poo.

Hermit crab tracks

Further along the beach, was the old leatherback track from the turtle we saw during our Ventana patrol with Collin (it had come up and wandered around near the beachfront houses, but decided she didn't like what she saw and returned to the ocean):

At the very end of Ventana Beach is an estuary, where two nights ago the Ventana night patrol had seen crocodile tracks. We didn't find a croc, but there were plenty of Great Herons hanging out:








Overall, Morning Walk is really pleasant and often patrols see cool things. The patrol this morning saw a sea snake...! They usually come up if something is wrong - they might be sick or old - but the one they saw seemed fairly alert so Sean decided to put it back in the water. Sea snakes are highly venomous, but Sean is an Australian biologist, and like your typical Aussie outdoor adventurer, he wrestled it back into the water.

So macho, right?!