2017 - Going into the final stretch

Our sea turtle course is slowly drawing to a close for 2017. It was an action-filled season (like every year, of course!). To give you a slight idea, this morning’s shift saved many hatchlings from certain death: 30 hatchling were freed from under a stone in one nest, in another, two hatchlings emerged in the morning and remained disoriented on top of the nest, where they would have soon succumbed to the heat: we carried them across a very wide cobble zone and brought them the water’s edge, where they successfully crawled the last few meters into the sea. In our final action, we were able to locate 4 hatchlings that had become completely entrapped in the maze of wooden walkways and sunbeds of a 5-star megahotel complex (built on the beach, of course….). It was all in a day’s work. One part of the team is heading back to Vienna this weekend, and the final group is staying another week, during which many of the remaining nests are expected to hatch and we can update our datasheets with the final excavation data. The work with our Turkish hosts from Pamukkale University has been exemplary the whole season. The hard work day and night makes for tight friendship and trust!  Michael