Morning Survey on Bathway Beach

Sunrise on Bathway Beach

Man-made ugliness

We do not do night surveys for turtles on Bathway beach. It’s a hub of human activity, and there are fewer turtles. So, two volunteers take turns to walk down to the beach to do a survey at dawn every morning to check for tracks, estimate whether a nest was made, and rake over the tracks to deter poachers. We rake Levera beach too. This is not a simple job as the turtles leave large grooves in the sand where the darker sand under the surface leaves a clearly visible trail.

This morning, there was a man digging intermittently on the beach. My first thought was  - poacher! My second was – what the heck are we going to do – we had forgotten to bring a phone or a radio, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to take him on as he was also carrying a machete. He kept walking in front of us, and digging at random. Before we caught up to him he went and had a dip in the sea. On describing the activity to the supervisors later on, it turns out he was probably looking for crabs to use as bait rather than following a turtle egg poaching pattern. Thank goodness we didn’t call out the cops!

Sometimes the only tracks we see are our own

We found 3 tracks in all – one looked like a turtle walkabout (a “false crawl”) where they come onto the beach but don’t dig or lay eggs. It was very close to another one and I couldn’t help wondering if it was the two ladies from a night ago.