Emiel's final blog

Hello everyone, it is Emiel again. The journey comes to an end.

 It has been an amazing experience and I learned a lot. The hawksbill turtle nesting season was just ending when we arrived so for our project we did not have a lot of work to do with nesting turtle as there weren't any!

Green turtle track from above using the drone

We (me and my buddy Tarek) went on beach patrolling every Wednesday, on all the 14 main nesting beaches, to see if there were any emergences and nesting of green turtles. Green turtles nest the year round. Every second week we found green turtle tracks and also some nests, mostly on Anse Grand Police and AnseBazarca. The last week, we even got to fly a good high-tech drone! We were testing if it would be a more efficient way of patrolling the beaches. It wasn’t at that moment, probably because we were still figuring out how we could do it in the best way, but regardless it was awesome.

The other days we helped out with the other projects. We helped out Inga with here terrapin trapping project, even taking over her project for a week when she was away. This was very cool as we had the chance to drive around the south of the island, to all the different wetlands. Some of them were in the forest, some of them in local farms or even in peoples’ backyard. Everyone was

always really friendly and interested in what we did, asking us questions and being enthusiastic when we caught a terrapin. We even got filmed by a crew of CNN, for a documentary.

On Tuesday and Thursday, we usually did bird monitoring. I really liked this one. We had a few transect across the Banyan Tree wetland where we would then count all the birds we found on our path. This was a great opportunity to learn about all the different birds in the wetlands in on Mahé. In the end, we saw all the birds there were to see in the wetlands and from some of them even their nests and juveniles. 

Luckily, after three weeks, we did not have to do the water hyacinth clearing anymore. It was not the most fun job in the world and on top of that it did not really feel helpful. They were growing way to fast! The resort finally realized they had to do something about it and hired an external contractor to

Last and not least, everyones’ favorite, the beach profiling. To do a beach profiling, you have certain fixed points along the beach, on the most inland side of the beach. At low tide, you define the angle/inclination of the beach and the distance towards the sea. You repeat that for each time the angle changes, until you get to the water. You repeat all this for all the points on the beach. We did this for 6 nesting beaches (Anse Intendance, Anse Grand Police, Anse Petit Police, AnseBazarca, AnseCorail and AnseCachee). This way if you do it each month over a long period of time, you can see how the beaches evolve over time. Do they rise because they get more sand deposit from the sea or do they erode? Interesting job but time consuming and exhausting as you spent the whole day in the sun.

All in all, it was an amazing experience with a lot of amazing people to work with! I really enjoyed my stay but sadly, now it’s time to go back home to Belgium. I would like to thank everyone I worked with for the great time I had here. Thank you Vanessa, Alessia, Rebecca, Tarek, Elena, Luana and Inga.

A shot I took with the drone!