Tonight we went on our first turtle patrol!
It was quite an eventful night.
It, of course, was raining cats and dogs the whole time but we hardly noticed amidst everything that happened.
We started with a four mile hike through beach then jungle, more beach, 3 rivers, more jungle, then one more beach, and one more jungle climb to Playa Grande- one of the major nesting grounds for turtles. We had to be careful about shining our bright lights in case we happened upon a turtle- only red lights are allowed when you see one otherwise it will get confused about the time of day and the direction it needs to go to get back out to the ocean.
On our way there we encountered our first turtle! She had just laid her eggs and was heading back out to sea. We got to sit and watch her make her slow trek back to the ocean for a few minutes then we continued onward.
We patrolled Playa Grande for a couple hours, making sure the beach was clear for turtles to come nest then headed back when the tide started coming in again.
We didn't see much during the patrol- just a lot of desecrated nests that animals had gotten to before we could.
As we were getting ready to go back through the jungle one of our dogs, Sabrina, decided to pick a fight with an anteater. She barked and bit and it hissed and swiped and we all yelled and watched until finally we got our little girl away from it but not without a few scratches on her snout. It was an intense ten minutes.
We continued back through the trees and beaches. When we got back to Playa Montezuma we passed the hatchery just in time to see another turtle- this time laying her eggs. We sat and watched for a good half hour. When she finished she used her big flippers to cover up the hole then did a kind of dance with her shell to pat it all down. Then as a decoy she did the same thing with her shell and flipped around some sand a little way away from the actual nest.
Walking down the street through town at 2 in the morning we all kind of laughed at what an epic night we had just had.
