Thursday, November 17, 2011

Phase 114B - All Change


We are now into the second half of phase 114 and the last time that we have the pleasure of 5 week volunteers! The 7 ‘newbies’ to our group have navigated their way through all the training and have been enjoying their first surveys this week. These recruits have swelled our ranks back to 17 and base seems to be very full once more.

This second half of phase has seen a small change to the structure of our surveys. Loraine is trying out some methods of extending our species list to include moths, an under-represented portion of our species list so far. This has seen us adding an extra night survey to the rota to replace the turtle walks that disappeared at the end of October. But if you ask the crazy leatherback that has been nesting on the beach recently (see previous jag walk post) we should be carrying them on for a little while yet!



We have also welcomed back the GVI boat, Iriria, to our base. This has allowed us to recommence bird surveys on our more distant routes, as well as provide easier access to the land of pizza and milkshakes at the weekends.

Finally, Benji (our jag man) is hoping that the lack of turtle tracks will make the jaguar tracks more evident but the weather is trying to have its say on that! So we are trying to photograph tracks again and identify the jaguars on the beach this year. Hopefully this will provide us with the ability to compare results to last year’s project which should provide an interesting insight into the jaguar make-up of the area.

All this makes for an action packed last few weeks of the year, hopefully we will have some exciting stories to post in the coming weeks!
-Rich, Base Manager



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