The First Day

OK, now that I've had a good night's sleep and a nice* shower, I can actually remember everything that happened yesterday...

*and by nice, I mean a trickling cold shower because of the water regulations in effect here. They are in the third year of a horrible drought, and there are usage restrictions... sound familiar??

I actually left California on Monday evening, on a red-eye flight to Miami. After a long layover, I flew directly to Liberia, the main airport in the Guanacaste province. If you look on a map, Costa Rica is almost directly south of Florida, so it was actually a fairly short flight. We flew over Cuba, the Cayman Islands, and Nicaragua.

Looking out the airplane window over Nicaragua, I spotted this smoking volcano:


UPDATE: just got back from breakfast and saw a report about this volcano on the Costa Rican news! But it was all in Spanish so I can't tell you anything about it...

Jack and Amy, trying to figure out how to get into the Station Fortress...

I met Amy (who works with Earthwatch) and Jack (a teacher from Manhattan) at the airport, and we took the hour-long shuttle to Playa Grande where the station is located.


The rest of the group was off doing an excavation, so we took a tour of the station from Nathan, one of the biologists. We played with the bucket o' hatchlings until the others returned, and Nathan gave us an overview of what we'd be doing.




The house is divided into two sides - one for the biologists (there are 7 or 8... we haven't met them all) and one for the 11 volunteers. My roommates are Justine (a teacher from Salinas) and Mili (a biology student from Panama).

There are many different jobs to do, and Nathan gives us a new assignment every day. All the information we need is posted on a whiteboard outside the biologist's side of the house.

On the upper left side of the board, 'Marea' tells us when the evening high tide will be: important because the leatherbacks don't like traveling on land very far, so they wait until high tide and crawl the shortest distance to dry land. If the eggs are laid too far from the water, the sand is too dry and their egg tunnels will collapse; if it is below the waterline, the eggs will drown. The start and end times tell us when we will be doing night patrols.

V, N, and S, are areas on the beach (MW is the Morning Walk, from 5:30-8AM to find any stragglers) - that's where the patrols will be. Each patrol walks out 20 minutes, rests 20 minutes, and walks back 20 minutes - this is because Leatherbacks take about an hour to nest, so we'll never miss one.

The hatchery is guarded 24-7; we monitor the nests every 30 minutes (because thats about how long it takes for a baby to dig itself out of the sand) and protect the hatchery from predators (raccoons, coati, porcupines, etc.) You'll see my initials for the 18-00 - that's the 6PM to midnight shift. LC, one of the biologists, actually did it from 6-7:30 while we were at dinner.

The last thing on the board is the tally for Baulas (leatherbacks), Loras (olive ridleys) and Negras (black- same species as green) turtles. The turtles are tagged with microchips in their shoulder (the exact same chip as cats and dogs have), so when a turtle nests, the biologists can tell if it has been here before. The 20 baulas mean 20 different individuals; turtles nest on average 7 times each season, so even though we may see a nesting leatherback, it likely will be a returner and the tally won't go up.

Mmmmm, dinner...

When I first found out I was coming on this trip, I was 94% excited and 6% scared. It was scary because I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I only had 7 days to prepare. As luck would have it, I found out that Dean Lorenzo, a teacher from Saratoga was also coming. I met Dean last summer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium teacher seminar, so it was nice having someone to bombard with questions before we left!

We had dinner at Kike's, a local restaurant about 800 m from the station. We only eat two meals a day - breakfast at 11AM (late to
give the late-nite patrols some time to sleep) and dinner at 6. Every morning we get a menu and pre-order that night's meal.

After dinner we quickly got dressed (long pants to protect from sand fleas, official Earthwatch shirt to allow us on the beach after hours, sneakers for walking around in the dark) and headed off to our duties. We all have headlamps with red filters - turtles don't see in the red spectrum, and white light confuses and scares them. This also means no cameras after dark... so look at this and imagine it on a moonless, eerie night...


Each nest is covered (so the little turtles can't escape... this is basically Alcatraz for hatchlings) and a thermometer is attached so the biologists can monitor temperature (which tells them when the nest is due to hatch). We had a nice blanket and chairs to sit on, and every 30 minutes we needed to check the nests.

For four and a half hours, we chatted, stargazed, and -as Justine so eloquently described - guarded sand. But in the last 10 minutes of our shift, all the action happened. We babysat little turtles, scared off predators, discovered new hatchlings, and did the release.

By the time I got back to bed, it was 1:30 in the morning and I fell into an exhausted, much needed sleep!