Week Two!

          Hey guys! So I made it through two weeks so far! It hasn’t been easy either. It’s definitely hard to adjust to such a different working lifestyle, but I’m so grateful for this experience and all the skills I will have acquired by the end of August. Yesterday was uber exciting since I got my boating license! I had to take an 8 hour class, but I didn’t even have to drive a boat to get it haha. I don’t think it will come in much use back in Ohio, but it sure will when I get the chance to study coral reefs someday, hopefully in Australia! ;)

            In this blog I wanted to talk about turtle trapping, but I haven’t been able to get on the boat and take any pictures yet. I have taken a few snapshots of us processing the turtle nests though, so I figured I’d load those up this time around. One really exciting thing is that I found my first turtle nest last Friday!! :D I also found another one today and I caught a turtle in the grass along the shoreline. One nest may seem like an unproductive day for me personally, but I’m just now starting to get the hang of this. Overall though, since May 23^rd, we’ve caught a total of 100+ turtles and we’ve found 135 turtle nests! Last year’s group never found any more than that, so this year is looking to be a huge turtle nesting season since we still have a few weeks to go! Now for some pictures!

A turtle nest is found!

            Turtle nests are really hard to find, as I’ve said before. This nest we found here only looked like a little bit of turned up sand and we would have missed it if there weren’t turtle tracks leading to it. When you see a patch of sand that looks disturbed you have to be very careful when digging so as to not puncture one of the eggs if it ends up being a nest. The first sign you have a nest is when you feel the sand cave in while digging, meaning you have located the pocket that the eggs were laid in. After a little more digging a bit of white or pink egg starts to appear and hallelujah! You’ve found a turtle nest!

Lisa taking hardcore data!

Weighing the eggs.

            After digging up all the eggs very carefully, you have to clean all of them off and weigh them. We also record data on the depths of the nest, the exposure to the sun, the area it was found in, GPS coordinates, and any other comments about possible predation or other factors. We can only dig up the nest if the eggs are new though (meaning they have no air pockets) since older nests are more fragile and can’t be moved around a lot. Once the nest has been processed, we place all of the eggs back in the hole as they were before, cover it back up, put a protective fence over top of it, and flag it with a specific number. Then on to find your next nest! It gets pretty exhilarating once you start finding a lot of them.

Putting the eggs back in the hole.

A processed turtle nest.

            Hopefully, I can get pictures of the turtle trapping for next weeks blog and sooner or later the eggs will be hatching so there will be a lot of pictures of that too! See ya!

                                      Tessa :) 

Bug Bite count for week two = 14

Week One!

Hey everyone! My name is Tessa Barman and I’m starting this blog to document my experience during my internship on Poplar Island in Maryland this summer. First, you may need to know some background information regarding the island. The Poplar Island Environmental Restoration Project (PIERP) was directed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1998 to restore an island that was being eroded away in the Chesapeake Bay. To date, they have completely remade the four mile, 1140 acre island that was once Poplar Island before the erosion began. Construction is expected to continue until 2027 and there are possibly new plans being negotiated to make the island even bigger since they have a surplus of the material dredged from shipping channels that they are using the rebuild the island. When complete, the island will be a wildlife heaven with upland and wetland areas for all different species that used to previously live on Poplar.

Poplar Island showing all the separated cells on it.

            Now that you have a basic understanding of the island itself you’re probably wondering what my internship entails. Currently I’m working alongside Dr. Roosenburg and three other students to monitor the survivorship and growth of the terrapin turtle populations on the island.  It’s extremely important that we examine the nesting activity since a lot of construction is occurring on the island and we are there to protect the nests and relocate them if necessary. We also trap turtles in fyke nets to measure and tag them before releasing them back into the water. It’s pretty neat! Here’s how my first few days went:

Lisa demonstrating how big the life jackets are!

            On June 13^th my adventure began waking up at 5:30am to get ready before we left at 6:30am to drive to the boat dock. I dressed in an old t-shirt, wind pants, waterproof tennis shoes, my awesome Scion hat I got at a car show, and the finishing touch of spraying myself with two different types of bug spray (one had 98.11% deet in it) and putting two different types of suntan lotion on underneath that. After scarfing down some Kashi cereal, I grabbed my leaking water bottle and backpack and we started the 15 minute drive to the Tilghman Island and boarded the boat for Poplar Island. It’s pretty awesome that I get to take a 20 minute boat ride to work every day, I must say.

The Turtle Shack

Walking along the shoreline.

After arriving on the island, it was all work from there. We started off by splitting up and searching in the different cells of the island for turtle nests. It’s extremely difficult to find turtle nests in the grassy areas, let me tell you! You’d think you’d just find turtle tracks and see a pile of dug up dirt, but these turtles hide their nests pretty darn well. The key features to look for are disturbed vegetation, different colored sand, and a few strands of grass on top. There’s no mound of dirt or anything; it’s completely flat. The problem is that everything looks disturbed after walking through it a million times and there are tons of ant hills all over that, after it rains, look exactly like a turtle nest since they look like lighter colored sand. You also can’t see any tracks through the grassy areas since there’s no beach sand by the water. I have yet to find a turtle nest myself, but our first day we found ten, the second day we found four, and the fifth day we found two.

Turtle tracks in wet sand.

Turtle tracks in dry sand.

After a grueling four hours of walking through bug infested wetland areas and along the beaches, it was time to head to the shed (or turtle shack as we call it) for a lunch break. My peanut butter sandwich was like a dream after all of that walking exercise. Then we spent the rest of the day searching for more nests before heading to the boat back to the mainland at 3pm. Funny thing is, Dr. Roosenburg lost the keys to his car that first day so, while we took the boat ride home and hitched rides from other people to take us back to the house, he had to stay to look for his keys and wait for the 5pm boat ride back. We have yet to find his keys to this day!

Every day pretty much starts out the same looking for nests but in my next blog I’ll tell more about how we capture the turtles and process them and I'll being taking more pictures to post so you can really get a feel for what we do with the nests and captured turtles!

Sleeping on the boat ride back!

Sincerely,

      Tessa :)


Bug Bite count for week one = 12