by Megan McKeown, of University of Vermont
Week five here in Costa Rica! These five weeks have been a blur of amazing adventures and fascinating research. This week has been packed full of our final days of dung beetle research, Micaela’s sunset birthday dinner on the rocks of Piro beach, beautiful hikes in the primary tropical forest, two sunrise sea turtle and beach clean-up walks, and the hatching of 84 olive ridley sea turtles.
For Micaela’s 21st birthday celebration we decided to have a special dinner at the Piro beach rocks during sunset. We prepared dinner at camp, collected some birthday candles and our headlamps, and took the trail to the beach. We settled on a nice flat rock that gave us the perfect view of the crashing waves and the setting sun and enjoyed dinner. We sang happy birthday and continued our celebration with some guitar and mandolin playing. Micaela blew out the candles and we hiked back to camp preparing for an early wake up for dung beetle research the next morning.
Our last days of dung beetle research were spent on my personal favorite plots of all those that we surveyed throughout our two weeks. These were the “T plots” located in the primary tropical forest at the highest elevation of the Osa Conservation property. After an 11 kilometer hike through the forest alongside squirrel monkeys, white faced capuchins, a red capped manakin, and one coral snake, we dug holes in the ground and set the traps! Once we reached the highest point we were rewarded with a stunning view of the Pacific ocean and the primary forest below.
Friday morning the team woke up to the sounds of our alarms and howler monkeys at 4:15am to start our first sunrise sea turtle and beach cleanup patrol. We walked to the station to meet the sea turtle researchers then all together walked the trail reaching Piro beach just before sunrise. As the sun rose just behind the tropical forest over the Pacific ocean we gathered trash and looked for tracks leading to nests laid the previous night. We learned how to differentiate between Green and Olive Ridley tracks and how to read the tracks in the sand to determine where a nest is.
We were lucky enough to have our second to last day at Piro fall on the birthday of 84 olive ridley sea turtles. The nest had been relocated to the hatchery in order to protect it from rising tides and increased predation. When we heard the turtles had emerged from their nest we quickly hiked down the dirt path through the tropical forest to the hatchery on the beach. When we got there we met Shannon, one of the sea turtle researchers, and the 84 baby turtles! They were placed in a tub so they could be released when the sand cooled down and the sun wouldn’t reveal them to predators. We watched them squirm and climb around and even got a chance to hold them. As the sun began to set, the tub was brought down to the beach where they were freed and made their first steps into the crashing Pacific. As the swells grew we could see them being swept out to sea, hoping that each one of these turtles beat the 1 in 1000 odds of survival.
As our final days at Piro are coming to a close, I’ll be sure to miss the daily sightings of monkeys, glowing sunset and sunrises at the Piro beach, sea turtles hatchlings, and the intense biodiversity all around us!