The start of the new year is still a very busy time on Cousin island.

At the moment we are still busy with turtles emerging to nest but we also have our hands full with hatchlings emerging and monitoring the nests that were laid earlier in the season. At the moment we also have a number of seabird species arriving on the island for nesting. Fairy terns and White tailed tropic birds both nest in their greatest numbers during the current season on the island. As soon as most of the birds appear to have laid their eggs the wardens will attempt to conduct the seabird census to determine just how many pairs of seabirds are using the island to nest.

At the moment most of the fairy terns seem to have eggs although many more are arriving each day. The fairy tern doesn’t actually build a nest but lays its eggs right on the branch or any slightly flat area. The parents take it in turns to incubate and guard the egg. Eggs that are left unguarded can easily be pushed off the branch by hungry skinks. Once the chicks hatch they have to hang on to the branch but they have very large feet to help them with this while they wait patiently for their parents to return from sea with a mouthful of fish.

The other birds arriving on the island at the moment include white tailed tropic birds and brown noddies. This time of year is not the busiest or most crowded on Cousin as far as seabirds go. During June and July the lesser noddies also breed and pairs can be seen building nests on almost every branch and things get very crowded.

While a lot of the work I do is involved with looking after the monitoring on Cousin, I also work on some projects on the main island of Mahe. I first came to Seychelles to study the tiny endemic frogs that are found on Mahe and Silhouette. These are the only 2 islands in the world that these frogs call home. Recently the Zoological Society of London launched its EDGE amphibians web site which is a follow up to its EDGE mammals site.

Almost half of the worlds known amphibian species are declining. In an attempt to highlight and help the worlds endangered amphibians the ZSL has compiled a list of the worlds 100 most threatened and evolutionarily distinct amphibians. Seychelles is home to 13 species of amphibians, including an endemic family of frogs, the Sooglossidae, and 6 species of caecilians. Like many of the amphibians on the list the Sooglossids, along with the caecilians in Seychelles, receive only limited conservation attention. A lack of resources and support means that monitoring of these animals relies on project funding.

For the Sooglossid species much information about their basic biology and ecology remains unknown as money and resources to study these animals can be scarse and their tiny size makes studying them even harder. The small metamorphs of Gardiner’s frog does not need water and it goes through the tadpole stage inside the egg, hatching out as a tiny frog the size of a grain of rice.

Nature Seychelles is continuing to monitor the distribution and abundance of this species as well as the other amphibians found on Mahe. Hopefully detailed monitoring will mean that any change in abundance and distribution can be detected and ensure the continued survival of this tiny beast and its close relatives.

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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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