I finally understand what "soaked the bone" means

I will never be dry again! Its either wet and rainy or I’m sweat drenched. I finally went out with my housemates to find toads, in the rain. You see turtles like warm, dry weather for nesting and toads like wet warm weather to, ahm, “get jiggy with it” I believe is the scientific term. If one animal doesn't like the weather, chances are the other will. Catching toads, Sounds easy, right? Nope. These guys are small, come out in downpour at night and are slippery little suckers. The first time I went out Momiana (Emily and I’s new name for Cricket) we walked 10 feet down the path and we found 9 toads, apparently unheard of (I have a video of this I’ll be posting). I have been dubbed a toad magnet and Momiana is threatening to keep me in the back seat of the car every time they go out to catch toads.

The turtle lull continues with a turtle here and there, just in time for my family to visit! My family came to visit! Yay! I lead them on a tour of Great Island, we didn't see any turtles, it was foggy and very un-turtley weather. Which ended up with jokes of how the terrapins didn't exist and it's all a conspiracy. (Sadly, some people believe this. These guys are hard to find if you’re not looking. People have said we plunk them down on their property…Yes, because Mass Autoban took time and effort to displace a threatened species in your backyard just to inconvenience you. *sarcasm sign*).

As Murphy’s Law dictates we found a turtle today, barely 30 minutes into the walk, with a sonic tag!  This turtle was freaking out, she wouldn’t calm down. Emily and I received a few lovely claw marks to go with our greenhead fly bites (first flys of the season, itchy). The funny thing was when we put her down she didn’t run back into the marsh; she immediately started digging and then laying her eggs! She basically decided “I’m gonna lay my eggs whether you’re here or not! Biological Prime Directive!”

We also went out to Middle Marsh, how you might ask? By boat, ah yeah! We hopped on to Professor B’s boat and jetted out into the bay to look for more turtles. We didn’t find any turtles, but we startled a hawk 3 feet from us and nearly flew into Professor B! 

Today’s terrapins: 1

Total terrapins: 50!!!!!

Nest total: 11

There's a toad in our freezer

I’m not kidding, it’s right next to the waffles. This is what happens when you have a house full of scientists. It’ll only get worse as we grow older, Professor B has shown us some of her prizes, I can’t wait to have a glass cabinet full of animal bone, sea glass, and shells! Right now I’m only collecting feathers. I have a wild turkey and several others I haven’t I.D.’d yet. They toad is from my two of my housemates (who I shall now refer to as Cricket and Peanut). Everyone in the house is wonderfully insane. Its been nothing but inappropriate jokes, zoology references, and non-stop giggling…and food, lots and lots of food! We’ve gone to Stop and Shop maybe three times this week already, the fridge is packed, and we’ll probably run out of food my Friday. Don’t judge, “we’re four grown women with vaginas and periods” so says Peanut. Peanut is hilarious, with the metabolism of a roadrunner! Cricket is just as funny, and speaks Hungarian and Japanese! Yay! We also like to show each other goofy clips and speak in quotes, tour current fav is End of Ze World, or nostalgic if you’re my age.

On a more serious note, we have begun the first lull of the turtle-nesting season. From what I’ve been told there is two nesting peaks with a quite period in between them. So far there are only one or two turtles nesting. We’ve found some more nests (with some predated, sad I know, but that’s nature) and we’re stopping our egg count because most of the eggs we’ll find now are older, and turning them may cause the egg-embryo bond to break and kill the babies.

…Oh my everything…I definitely earned my sleep tonight. Yesterday and today was a marathon of everything we’ve learned to do so far: patrolling, wading, kayaking, etc. all day. I’m not complaining; I just feel like a geriatric patient. On the bright side, I take my lunch breaks on the beach! OH YEAH! It was a perfect day;

The sun was warm and bright, the ocean half-heartedly rolling on the shore. Emily and I enjoyed a leisurely lunch beneath a drift an old lean-to compiled of driftwood and other flotsam and jetsam. A lazy breeze ruffling the dune grass as we stared into the faded denim scenery, the sky and water seamlessly melded until the horizon fading into nothingness.

This is me trying to be poetic, take what you will from it.

PS- Since we are stopping the egg count I’m just going to post the total number of turtles and nests as we find them! Tootles!

Today’s terrapins: 6

Total terrapins: 48 (almost at 50!)

Nest total: 9 (7 are viable) 

The literature lied to me

Today was a perfect day! 70 degrees, sunny, little wind…I found one turtle. What is wrong with you turtles!!!! Don’t you read your own literature! Grrrrr…I’m not really mad, just a little annoyed that the one turtle I found was at the end of my route so I had to walk the path again. It was a hot walk, so after the walk I climbed the dunes on to the beachfront and took a dip in the ocean…with my clothes on. Didn’t have a bathing suit and at that point I didn’t really care. I can’t believe I’ve been living here for about two weeks and this is the first time I went swimming here. I work on a beach, why haven’t I taken advantage of it!

I didn’t find many turtles, but we found babies yesterday! They’re so cute! Granted they are eggs now, but they’ll hatch into cute little terrapins and scuttle into the salt marsh in a few months! Finding the nests is really tough though. We’ve been digging up every patted down area to find them, but until yesterday we didn’t find any real nests. Now that we’ve found 5, FIVE, nests I don’t feel like an idiot. I’ll put up pics later; there are at least 12 eggs in every nest we found. It must be tough for the mothers to lay up to 20 eggs, that's a lot for an animal the size of a dinner plate!

We also went kayaking the other day, while trying to catch turtles…its difficult to catch a turtle when you have a paddle in one hand, a net in the other, trying to chase after turtle heads popping up in the water, all the while trying not to tip over the kayak. It’s like Whack-a-Mole extreme outdoor edition; I loved it, and it’s completely free! I managed to find a little cove where a few of them were hanging out and got the paddle tangled up in the net at least thrice and I spent most of my time paddling back and forth after surfacing turtles only to have them scatter as soon as I put my paddle in the water. I caught one in the end! Skill or dumb luck? Don’t answer that.

While patrolling yesterday I got into several conversations because people wanted to know why I was wandering back and forth along the trail (I was following turtle tracks) and digging in the sand. By the time I turned around to walk back an older lady asked me if I was the “turtle girl”. Apparently word gets around fast on the beach. It certainly is a step up from “Hey lady” being pounded into your eardrums by a group of hyperactive first graders while guiding an aquarium tour. Turtle girl, I can live with that.

Turtle tally- 4 (and lots of little eggs)

PS- Emily passed her driver’s test! Yay! Now she won’t need to bike eight or so miles everyday to our study site when I leave!

The social dynamic of daddy long legs spiders…in my bathroom

With good weather come turtles…and tourists. It’s been cold and cloudy up until today so there weren't any before, but now we have some with the promise of a herd of them tomorrow. Turtles, that is…and tourists too. There were a lot of people out walking, kayaking, etc. and we got a few weird looks while processing a couple of turtles, but a lot of people were genuinely curious and wanted to know about them, which is AWESOME! Education for the win!! Anyway, tomorrow looks like it’s going to be a turtle bonanza. That’s the thing about field biology, there is either nothing to do, or you’re so busy you hardly have enough time for personal maintenance (e.g. sleep, food, etc.). But busy is good, Professor B is joining us with kayaks and a new volunteer tomorrow, catching turtles while kayaking; this can only end with me in the water (I’m not very coordinated). One of our turtle’s had a sonic tag on it from a grad we are working with, she wasn’t too happy about meeting us and managed to scratch both Emily and I up. Turtles claws are sharp, ouch!

On another note, driving in Wellfleet is a bit of a problem for me. It’s not the traffic or the other drivers…it's the wildlife. It’s everywhere! Its so distracting to see wild turkey or red fox run across the road or on the side of it and not go all zoology nerd and coo over various wild animals. One day I stopped on the road to watch a fox cross the street with a meadow vole in its mouth (Don’t worry, it was at 6 am and no one else was on the road, or else I wouldn’t have stopped). I even started a list of all the birds I’ve seen and my roomies and I try to I.D. all the birds we see from the porch. We had a nest of Eastern Phoebes over our doorway and the parents would always yell at us when we stepped out. The babies were so fluffy! The 4 of them were bursting out of their nest until yesterday, they all fledged and flew away. Bye bye birdies!

My roomies and I are getting along pretty well; it’s easy when you’re all huge animal geeks!

Turtle tally: 3

PS- We have a daddy logs legs or 2 in our bathroom and due to laziness and the fact we are all zoology nerds we left her up there and tend to watch them interact as we wash, rinse, repeat. So far the one has fended off several other daddy long legs at her spot in the corer ceiling…yeah I know, nerdy.

Rain rain go away...Seriously, you're scaring the turtles!

Turtles don't like rain…sounds silly, but its true…ok so they don’t like the cold and usually rain brings colder weather... So there haven’t been any turtles in two days. We still have to check just in case, not an easy task this morning. It was raining so hard this morning that I couldn’t see the road! Scary! So we turned around and slept in, yay! We went our later though. We also went to Professor B’s house for dinner and turtle talk. (I’m just beginning to realize how many cutesy things you can add to turtle, turtle trackers, turtle talk etc.) We have some big things planned like talks and boat based tracking coming up, I’m so excited for it! We had a really nice dinner and talk with her and her family (and play with their adorable dogs!) On an completely unrelated note, I got my Coral Reef Ecology class approved! It’s been an uphill trek the entire way, but it all paid off, thank goodness. So…that's all from me, there really hasn’t been much going on for the past 2 days, I’m till wiped out though, and its freezing up here! “summer” up in Cape Cod is unpredictable at the best of times. I forgot this little tidbit and didn’t bring any blankets up, oops. I’ll go looking for some tomorrow!

Turtle tally: 0 (I blame Mother Nature)

PS- I posted pics on Facebook under “A Day at the Office”

Why the grass is not always greener on someone else's lawn or why scientists need permits

Hi everybody! I would have posted last night but the power went out, meh. It really stinks when every thing in the house runs on electricity…and you were in the process of making pasta. But, the power is back on so I’ll just lump 2 posts into 1!

Wednesday

Turtles are very sneaky, they don’t look like it, but they are. Yesterday we found some turtles on the side of the road. So Emily and I hung back and let them do their thing…bad idea. Both of them crawled up into private property, one disappeared while the other went trundling along for about 20 minutes looking like she was going to build a nest, dig, and then stick her nose up at the spot! I know this is a behavior called false nesting (they make a divet and decide not to nest there) but it felt like she was mocking me! Do you know how humiliating it is to be mocked by a turtle? I was so focused on the one that by the time I noticed the second one come out she was half way across the road, but I caught her! She wasn’t too happy about it though; she kept trying to bite me. On a side note did you know diamond back terrapins can bend their neck over the carapus (top of the shell)? Makes holding them a game of hot potato, or is it hot turtle? We ended up finding 3 turtles in all and tried to catch turtles in the estuary; the key word is “try”. Between the 2 of us we kicked up enough mud to obscure anything we would have found, the out going tide didn’t help. We did get to chat with a vacationing elderly couple out kayaking on the way back though. They were so friendly and interested in what we were doing; it’s nice to have people appreciate your work. I thought we were done for the day; we unloaded the car, made lunch and was just about to take a nap when my phone rang…apparently Mass Autoban had terrapins coming up with the second tide at the sanctuary and wanted us to check Great Island again. So we packed up again and walked the trail, we didn’t find anything…fantastic (heavy sarcasm ahoy).

Thursday

There must be some sort of turtle convention at this one house on the beach because every time I go there at least 5 turtles pop out of now where. That's what they do; you’re just walking along and all of a sudden, if you’re looking, there’s a turtle! We even found one on Stumpy’s Hill! It wasn’t Stumpy though. You would think that the turtles would go to convenient locations first, but the places we’ve been finding them are ridiculous! We’ve found them is places like on top of hills and people’s lawns. It’s quite a trek for such a little creature! Diamond back terrapins are also veeeerrrry indecisive. I tailed one for over half an hour as she walked up and down dunes, on to the beach front, and then back into the dunes. It was like watching a watching a very confused and lost person driving randomly around town, but they’re too stubborn to ask directions. She looked motivated though; wherever you wanted to get to little turtle, I hope you got there! I find it really unfair that turtles can wander on to private property and not get into any legal trouble; scientists (a.k.a. us) endure strange looks and need to carry around permits to show people we are neither crazy (that’s debatable) or burglars. It’s really awkward to stand in front of someone’s yard as you watch a turtle mosey through someone’s lawn pretending to dig a nest and when you dig for it there’s no eggs! The turtles, they are mocking me! We’re not supposed to catch them if we think they’re in the process of nesting and they usually disappear before we can. The owners are really nice about it, and they love to hear about what we’re doing. We did have one turtle nest but she didn’t cover up the nest and laid only one egg, which is strange. And the nest was right next to someone’s dive way…*face palm*. Because when you think of a good place to lay your eggs you think of big rolling tons of steel that can crush baby turtles like grapes. Maybe we sacred her, too bad I can’t ask her; I don’t speak turtle (but I do speak whale). We tried to find turtles in the estuary but it was so cloudy that we couldn’t see anything. Just as we turned to head back guess what we saw? A turtle! These turtles are hilarious so far and I can’t wait to see how they’ll surprise me next!

Total turtle tally: 12

PS- I’ll be posting pictures on my facebook account! 

Crash Course…I think I’m gonna collapse

Everyone who knows me will tell you that I am directionally challenged…today was no exception. Emily and I were supposed to meet Professor B at Dunkin’ Donuts to start work; we got there on time and were completely prepared. Except that we were at the wrong store. I can’t be blamed for this one though, there are so many freakin’ Dunkin’ Donuts in New England! So we toured a couple of the sites our Professor monitored and went to Professor B’s house to get our equipment.

            We finally got to see our site today and it was beautiful! We spent most of the time walking into the dunes, looking for tracks. So…much…walking! It just confirms how woefully out of shape I am. I de-sanded my shoes twice and still had a mountain of it left when we got back. We walked pretty far, maybe a couple of miles. The end of our site is this large sandy hill where one of our “infamous” terrapins likes to lay her eggs. Her name is Stumpy (side note, there was a great white shark named Stumpy on a Shark Week special in the early 90s…yeah I know I’m obsessed); she has no tail and 3 of her fins are nearly gone, but every year she paddled up this huge dune! That's dedication for something the size of a plate! We didn’t see any turtles today, though we did find the very fragrant carcass of a dead marine mammal, barf. We finished up early and had the rest of the day off. We didn’t do much today, but we’ll be doing a lot more when the turtles arrive. That has to be the most frustrating part of this kind of work; it all depends on the wildlife…and nature.

           

            Afterwards I jogged with Emily and Kristen in the reserve. Oh, I forgot to mention, I’m living in the National Seashore! And through Professor B I’m working for the National Park Service, and by extension the Department of the Interior. So…I work for the government! I’ve always wanted to say that. Any way I didn’t jog so much as jog for a few minutes, get winded, give up and plod along the trail. I lost the two and ended up wandering around, I found the beach though, so it wasn’t to bad. I also found a key…in the sand…that was kind of random. I think I’ll drop it off at the visitor’s center tomorrow. I also got some what lost on the way back, but I followed an itty-bitty bunny around the trials, which actually brought me back to the house. Thank you Mr. Rabbit!

Terrapin tally: 0 :(

Ps- There is a weird noise outside the house tonight. I think its bugs flying into the windows towards the light. It makes this small ‘thunk’ noise. Man are those little bugger persistent!

First day, first day! Yay!

            So this is my first blog entry…yep…so I drove up yesterday to for my internship, met with the professor I’m working with and the other intern, a friend from my school, and settled into our house. We have such a nice house! It’s practically a beach house and you can see the bay from our back porch and the beach is so close I can hear it! Its so pretty! I’ll post pics as soon as I muster enough motivation to. We’re sharing the house with two other girls who are working with spade-foot toads. They work at night so when we get up they’re going to sleep and vice versa. They’re really nice and we’re all getting along so far, good sign.

           

            I started working today! Yay! We met our professor at the sanctuary with another researcher and spent most of the morning catching terrapins out in a body of water dubbed “The Run”. Walking to the actual site took a little while because we had to walk through the woods, the marsh, and half the beach to get there; shimmy into our waders and walk out into the low tide. Fortunately the water was clear and you could walk out for forever and the water never went past my hips. Then we had to catch the terrapins. Sounds easy, right? Wrong! The whole “slow as a turtle” thing is a lie! A lie I tell you! You see them pop their heads up to breath or sitting on the bottom in front of you and you think “Ok, I’m just gonna pick you up” and bam, they take off swimming like Michael Phelps! If they could talk they’d be screaming “Run away, run away!” . My first catch was less than spectacular. It must have been as confused as I was because it swam a circle around me and then tried to swim between my legs! This was also the exact moment a guided tour of school kids was passing through, watching me hop around like I had ants in my pants. -__-‘ The four of us caught a total of 23 terrapins, excellent for the first round. We measured and weighed them and then tried to I.D. them. If we couldn’t we filed a series of notched in the outer edge of their shells. Before you get in a tizzy about hurting them, I’ve been told that it doesn’t hurt, it’s like clipping your finger nails. Then we let them go like the sea turtle specials your see on Discovery Channel. One swam back towards the shore…not the smartest egg in the bunch.

           

            After that Emily and I drove down to Sandy Neck so one of the rangers could show us turtle nesting signs. Tracking them is fairly easy, you just have to look for comma shaped marks in the sand, following them though make you wonder what the turtle is thinking. We followed one set of tracks that led from the marsh, into the sand around a huge dune, slid down, and went back into the marsh…that's a lot of work to end up deciding not to nest. We also got to see a laid nest, the eggs are so small! I can’t wait to see them hatch. We also got to see a piping plover nest on the beach front. The nest was basically a sophisticated divet in the sand surrounded by rocks. It was hard to tell that it was a nest because the eggs look like rocks. Both the parents were there and gave a “broken wing” display. The bird drops its wing and hobbles to say to predators “Look, I’m so hurt. Can’t you see how hurt I am? Eat me!” and then they fly away when the predator leaves the nest. It was really funny because both did it at the same time, cute! Then one ran straight at us so we left to calm them down. Talk about over protective parenting. That was my first day! Tomorrow we start patrolling the beach for nesting sites, we’ll see how that goes. Oh, I’m also gonna have a tally of all the turtles captured/spotted day by day for my own reference and you can follow along if you like!

Terrapin tally: 23