Another quiet week! We caught a grand total
of zero terrapins this week, but several accidental fish, which were
immediately released. Whilst exploring the wetlands I did find a beautiful
orchid-like vine growing beside the water, we are currently trying to identify
it to find out whether it is endemic or invasive.
Thursday was World Wetland
day and we celebrated with some educational tours around the wetland grounds. The
highlights included; a tiny moorhen hatchling, a green-backed heron and a rowdy
nest of cattle egrets. Bat surveys are also continuing in search of the
Seychelles sheath tailed bat, no luck so far.
On Friday we had some friends Susannah,
Felix and Rufus in who volunteered to help us out with the terrapin trapping and patrolling the
beaches. It was a very successful day, excavating four nests in total, one of
which had a huge clutch size of 180 hatched eggs.
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| counting the egg shells |
Another of the nests had been
laid inside a manmade wooden cave; we were relieved to find that the hatchling
turtles had still successfully made it out and to the ocean despite the
obstacles!
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| Excavating another nest |
Rufus and Felix were a great help on such a busy day, excavating the
nests, counting up the eggshells, and even inputting the anthropogenic data
into the Trimble on our beach patrols!
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| Rufus inputting data in the Trimble |
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