Things are getting busy on Cousin Island at the moment with more turtles arriving every day. And its not just nesting hawksbill turtles either, this week 3 new volunteers arrive on Cousin to assist with the turtle monitoring. At the busiest time of the nesting season there are patrols around all the beaches on Cousin every 2 hours and most of the time that means a new patrol starts before the previous one finishes. This keeps the Nature Seychelles’ wardens and the Conservation Officer, Eric Blais very busy. This year we are starting an extensive volunteer programme to help out at this important time of the year and this week we have a volunteer from Australia and 2 from the UK to help out. The three volunteers will join Oliver, our current volunteer who has been on Cousin for nearly three months now.

Oliver heads back to the UK in a couple of weeks after helping out with all the day to day activities on Cousin as well as the turtle monitoring. That includes lending a hand pushing boats and conducting guided tours for the many visitors that arrive on Cousin every morning during the week. At the moment on Cousin they are busy with 5 turtle patrols each day but this may increase to 6 as the island approaches its busiest time for nesting turtles.

Each patrol involves 2 people and a complete circuit of the island. When a turtle is encountered it is closely monitored to determine what stage of nesting it is at. The nesting turtle is measured and if it has identifying tags the numbers are recorded. If the turtle does not have tags one is applied to each of the front flippers so that when the turtle returns to nest it can be identified again. The nest site is marked so that the staff and volunteers can keep a close eye on the hatchlings when they are due to emerge from the nest.

Last year on Cousin it took on average 65 days for the nests to hatch after being laid. At the moment most of the focus of the monitoring is on detecting and identifying all of the adult turtles that emerge to nest. In the future we hope to concentrate more on the hatchlings and the nest success but at the moment it is a full time job keeping up with the emerging females. Last season 220 individual turtles were identified during the season and of these 70 were newly tagged. Hawksbill turtles nest multiple times in a season, usually it is about 2 weeks between each nesting attempt, and on average the turtles that use the beaches on Cousin nest 2.6 times each season. However, 4 turtles nested 6 times within the 2005-2006 nesting season.

The intensive monitoring of the turtles on Cousin means the work load of the wardens increases significantly during turtle season but with the help of the volunteers things are made a little easier and this means valuable information on the population of nesting females and the success of the new hatclings can be recorded and used to aid the conservation of these turtles and the species.

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