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