Ultimately, volunteering consists of three different work units, all of which you accompany. Let’s not go chronologically and start the day with monitoring the turtles at night. You can imagine that when turtles are ready to lay their eggs, they don’t want to do it on a busy beach. So when they are ready to lay their eggs, turtles prefer darkness. That’s why we patrol the beach from 9pm until sunrise at 7am. We patrol a 27km stretch of beach that we drive along in a small all-terrain vehicle. Here we try to discover by the footprints whether turtles are currently on land to lay eggs in a nest or whether they have already done so within a very short time. No time should be lost here, as the eggs should be transported to a safe fenced-in place/area (corral in Spanish) within the shortest possible time. Here the nests will be safe. If the eggs are not transported quickly to the secure area, they are more or less left to their current “nature”. This means that in addition to the animal dangers, there is also the danger of people stealing the turtles’ eggs and selling them. At popular spots, people are indeed waiting for the turtles to lay the eggs and then quickly take them. Therefore, it is immensely important to always be timely with the turtles. The current figures are such that without our help and safe removal, only 1 in 1000 turtle eggs survive (0.1%). With the relocation and the other actions I will describe in a moment, about 5-10 out of 100 (so do the math… 5-10%) can survive with our help. After a nest has been found and safely transported away, it is directly labelled with a sign, which we label with some important data to keep track of it (date of the find, estimated hatching date, number of eggs, names of the discoverers), because in such a corral there may well be around 100 nests.
¡Hey Tobi! Dicen que “recordar es volver a vivir” y al.leer tu post no pude evitar sonreír y revivir gratos momentos. Excelente información, has hablado con lujo de detalle sobre toda esta experiencia, con tu sello inigualable ✨ Un placer haber coincidido en el camino, ojalá que muy pronto nos volvamos a encontrar en este viaje llamado vida. ¡Muy buenas fotos y vídeos! 🐢 Abrazos desde tierras norteñas 🤠
Jajaja, gracias Anabel! La semana contigo y Aneth fue genial. gracias a ustedes he progresado mucho con mi español xD. Abrazos al norte
Ich bin total begeistert Tobi :)! Tolle Sache mit der Schildgrötenhilfe und wieder einmal spannend die Details zu lesen!
Dat freut mich Franzi xD. Aber ist auch echt mega cool und macht viel Spaß!
[…] Volunteering with baby turtles and where can I do it? […]
What a beautiful and magical experience!