Turtle Habitat

August 25, 2008

Habitaçao de Torturuginha

So, after almost exactly one year at site here in Cha di Igreja (my one year anniversary is this Monday actually!), I finally have an actual, tangible, con-crete something to show for my time and energy, which I am proud to un-veil to you today.

You may remember the INDP group (they of the turtles and matching white shirts) that I was working with last summer. We tried more or less unsuc-cessfully, to build turtle “incubators,” gave a formaçao on environmental awareness, staged a beach clean-up and a “Get To Meet The Baby Tur-tles” day in Cruzinha. Well, over the past 4 months, I’ve been helping to coordinate a series of meetings between the president of the Associaçao in Cruzinha and representatives from the INDP in Mindelo. Basically, during these meetings a plan of action was developed and last month, we finally put everything into action. The result of which is shown in the pictures be-low.

Essentially what we’ve got here is a Turtle Protection Area. Using rocks from the ribeira we built a protected, sheltered and monitored area to put turtle eggs. Obviously turtles don’t know to lay their eggs here (read my previous entry about Sea Turtles to learn how they lay their eggs in areas where the water comes up and drowns the eggs), so we also had a forma-çao where INDP trained some volunteers from Cruzinha how to watch for, measure, monitor and document each instance when a sea turtle lays eggs on the beach and then how to handle and move the eggs to the protected area. There is now a volunteer sleeping on each beach every night watch-ing for mama sea turtles. Each instance is then logged into a log book and there will be volunteer ready and waiting 45 days later to escort the little bastards to the sea when they hatch.

As you can see from the pictures, there has already been quite a bit of sea turtle egg laying activity, and the habitaçao is already being put to good use. The giant palm leaf was my idea. So without further ado, here is the Sea Turtle Protection Area at Praia Boca di Mocha!