For our first day of work attachment at MCSS, we had a
familiarization with the staff and the centre itself. We started the day with a
turtle patrol on nine different beaches and also got the chance to see a turtle
at Anse Corail, it was digging its hole for it to nest but unfortunately the
area wasn’t suitable due to Coconut roots in the ground and the turtle went
back to sea. Before it got back in the water, we measured its shell and took
pictures of both sides of its face for identification.
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| happy to be observing a turtle! |
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| monitoring the beach |
Back at the centre we x-rayed three female terrapins to see
if there are no eggs inside, then we measured and weighed one, Celeste painted
it for identification. Pictures of the plastron and shell were taken for
identification, we had to look through the system to see if it had been caught
before and it did, its name is SATAN.
During the course of the week we learned many things, we fed
Eden the turtle, cleaned its
tank and doing trips to the beach to get sea water
to fill up its tank. We learned about trapping, a method used to catch
terrapins using mackerel as bait, we set them up in different wetland areas. We
also cleaned the terrapin’s tanks were we keep them for a while when we catch
them, before releasing them again back where they were found.
We also did some bird survey and more turtle patrols; we had
a turtle at intendance beach Thursday morning. It had already laid its eggs
when we got there and it was in its covering stage, we measured the tracks and
also the turtle. We saw that it had been tagged and we recorded it but we took
pictures to identify it, it was very exciting.
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| restraining for measurements and ID pictures |
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| Following the turtle project leader Vanessa |
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