Week three

This week was our first week of going into the field on our own after our orientation! The two guys headed out to a backcountry beach and the three girls and one of our supervisors went to a beach called Pohue. We were there for 6 nights and have tomorrow off and then head back into the field again.

Pohue is probably my favorite beach we get to camp at so far! The sunsets are awesome.

Part of the turtle team! 

Our kitchen/base camp

Everyone gets to pack they're own food bucket,  and there's also a propane stove and basic kitchen stuff for us to use.

We had a lot of turtle activity this trip which is great! One night we had a turtle come up, dig around for maybe 10 minutes but then she headed back for the ocean. At that point we restrained her and checked her tags, measured her, and our data showed us the last time she came up to nest at this beach was in 2009. Restraining a 200 pound turtle is pretty tough! You have to lay on top of them and then get each arm under her flippers and lift them up so she can't get a flipper in the sand and push away. Since she didn't nest we knew she'd return the next night, and she did! She dug around for over three hours and dug 7 false nests and then returned to the ocean. But when all this was happening, we got a second turtle, which is pretty rare to have two at once! This was a new turtle who had never been tagged, so I got to apply new tags which was pretty cool. But she laid her nest below the high tide line, so we stayed up until 4am doing a nest translocation. After the turtle covered the nest, we had to dig it up, and one by one we placed all 160 eggs into a big bucket, and moved the nest to a safer location after replicating the nest size and dimensions. Our false nesting turtle returned the next night and laid her nest, but we had to do another translocation. Translocations are extremely rare, so it was pretty lucky we could do two back to back. 

After we did the nest translocation we put a nest cage over it. It should hatch in 55-70 days.

I also managed to open a coconut…it only took like 2 hours…..

The best bakery ever!! If you're ever on Big Island, this place is a must! It tasted so good after 7 days in the field.

Malasadas are my new favorite thing!