A "typical" day on Ossabaw
There is nothing typical about living on a barely-inhabited island. From donkey and gator roadblocks, getting a vehicle stuck in the beach, to having a plane make an emergency landing on the beach (see below) there are few 'normal' days.
But I'll try to describe what we do on a daily basis.
My alarm goes off at 04:47 (because I like weird times), and I roll out of bed to pull on some ever-flattering, eternally stained field clothes. God bless one of the DNR turtle technicians who wakes up before I do because the coffee pot is usually sputtering out that life-saving brew by the time I shuffle into the kitchen. After a strong cup of coffee and a granola bar, we hit the road at 05:30 in Kawasaki Mules and drive to the beaches. Ossabaw has north beaches (north beach and north middle), and south beaches (south beach, south middle, and middle middle). We (the two DNR technicians and myself) normally split up north and south beaches and switch off every other day.
Check out DNR tech, Kyle Coleman's picture below.
We make it to our respective beaches around 06:00 and begin monitoring. The monitoring process involves driving the Mules below last night's high tide line. While driving or walking the lengths of beaches, we look for crawlways that indicate that an adult sea turtle attempted to nest. We follow each crawlway and determine if a nest has been laid by looking for field signs of nesting. Field signs include thrown sand and ripped up vegetation. Below is a picture of what we would consider a 'classic' loggerhead nest.
As soon as we find a crawlway that looks like it leads to a nest, we probe the churned up sand until we find eggs. We use a wooden stick to probe the area where we think the nest may be located. Because the turtle had to dig a hole, the location of the eggs will have soft sand covering the clutch. As soon as the probe stick sinks into the ground, we excavate the area by hand until the eggs are unearthed.
Because I'm interested in hatch success, I need to know exactly how many eggs are in each clutch. I remove each egg and place it into a bucket with cool, wet sand. After I've removed and counted all eggs from the nest, I measure the depth of the nest. Next, half of the eggs are placed back into the nest. I put a temperature datalogger in the nest and then replace the second half of the eggs. The datalogger records temperature throughout the incubation of the nest. I take moisture measurements and record the amount of vegetation around the nest.
After I'm done with my measurements, we cover the nest with a plastic screen in an attempt to keep predators from interfering. We do this for all crawlways and nests that we come into contact with that day. Some days we only have a few crawlways--other days we've had to investigate 10-20 crawlways. Turtles may crawl up to nest, not find the right conditions (we still don't know much about site selection) and then turn around and save nesting for another night.
For the nests we find that aren't a part of my sample, we just collect one egg for DNA information, and then protect the nest like normal without disturbing any of the other eggs.
Together we monitor over 17 km of beaches a day. We pray daily that all of our methods of transportation are reliable. There's nothing worse than getting out to a beach and having a vehicle die on you which leaves us monitoring solely on foot. On July 4th this year (2017), we monitored and worked almost 12 km on foot before returning back to our house and finding the air conditioner had broken and the house was about 93 degrees F.
After we finish monitoring for new nests, we check every single nest that has been previously identified. We check to make sure that no predators (left) have found any eggs or hatchlings since we last saw the nest. We also look for little hatchling crawlways that let us know the nest has "emerged!"
Once the eggs begin hatching (55-70 days incubation), we start seeing hatchling crawlways leading away from nests and headed to the ocean.
Five days after the first hatchling left a nest (or day 70 of incubation), we remove the screen, which has holes just big enough for hatchlings to exit the nest. We pick out all of the eggs and count them. After releasing any straggler hatchlings to marine freedom, we pick up all of our equipment and head to the next nest.
We make it back to our house, wash the salt off of vehicles, and put on another pot of coffee. The Wi-Fi leaves a little to be desired, so as soon as it decides to connect to seaturtle.org, we're able to enter all of the data we've collected throughout the day.
After all of that, if the weather cooperates, I'll head back out to the beach to catch up on some reading. Before making dinner, we load up vehicles with gear for the next morning. We're usually exhausted by 21:30 or 22:00 and head to bed before doing it all again tomorrow.