Leatherback Turtle Watch at Sandy Point

Aerial photo of Sandy Point taken
from stcroixtourism.com

When I was a little girl, I remember going with my parents to see the Leatherback turtles come and nest on Sandy Point.  I tried to take A about 2 years ago to do the same, but the group we were with decided to leave at 10 and we didn’t get to see anything. So, in the spirit of homeschooling and experiencing the island I decided to give it a go this year. 

Let me just tell you, it was AWESOME, AMAZING, INCREDIBLE, and COOLIO!!!!

This was our group minus a few adults because
taking pictures in the dark is near impossible!

So, here’s the lowdown. Anyone can go see these amazing animals come up on shore and lay their eggs at Sandy Point as long as you have reservations and the turtles cooperate.  You need to get a hold of the Fish and Wildlife personnel to do this. If you have a large enough group (15-30 people) it’s like your own private tour, if you are a small group, they might be able to sneak you into another group.  Oh, and it’s FREE.  Of course if you want to make a donation to a great group you can pay St. Croix Environmental Association to make your reservations for you as they block off certain dates in advance.  Anyway, you need to make your reservations, confirm your date, and then on the day of gather at the Refuge entrance at 7:45 pm. Bring bug spray and PLENTY of it.  I brought drinks and snacks for my kids, but we ended up not needing anything but drinks. 

photo from simonsen.photoshelter.com

This is how it went for us. We got there, all the homeschoolers who had signed up for the field trip were there. We listened to Jennifer from the FWS talk and tell us the rules. We got back into our cars and headed into the refuge. After driving down some amazingly well paved roads, we got to our beach spot.  Then we waited – it was POURING for about 30 mins.  Eventually we got out of our cars and this is what happened according to A:

            When we got out of the cars it was wet and damp and I could smell the wet sand and the sea and it smelled wonderful. Then we went on a path to the ocean and there was a bridge that we had to pass. We went to a spot on the beach and we stayed there for an hour and a half until we got the first call on the radio and there was a leatherback sea turtle! When we got the call I was so happy that we were going to see a turtle nesting.

photo from thew2o.net

After getting the call on the radio, we packed up all our stuff and moved back to the road and booked it to the next parking area where we walked/ran to get to where the turtle was.  All this time, we were only using the light off the moon and the stars to navigate by. It was amazingly cool. We could hear the surf the whole time too because it was a rough night.  Once we got down to the beach were the turtle was, we had to walk along it until we actually found her.  The beach sand was a luminous white with ribbons of black seaweed all along it, so walking was a big difficult, but not bad.  All of a sudden, there appeared before a huge, hulking, black mountain that hardly moved at all but was quite substantial.  It was our leatherback momma.  She was in the process of laying her eggs. The researchers had started to collect her eggs as she was laying then in the area of the beach where the waves broke and could potentially have been washed out to sea if it had gotten rougher.  After being able to touch her carapace(shell), back flippers, shoulders, and even sides we got to see the researchers measure her from the front of her carapace to her back, measure her width, and put in new tags.  She did NOT like the new tag bit – can’t say I blame her. Then she disguised her nest for a bit before “the mother sea turtle clumsily slid into the black ocean.”

The kids named her Friday as we saw her on Friday the 13^th! She measured 164.5cm from the front of her carapace to the back. If you added her head into that she was at least 184 cm long if not longer.  She laid 132 eggs that night. Can you imagine doing that?!

Sadly out of those 132, probably only 1 will survive to sexual maturity and come back to nest. 

photo from youthgo.gov

If you have never been to a turtle watch before you NEED to do this. Email the Fish and Wildlife Service, call SEA, find a group, sell an arm or leg to do this. It is an AMAZING experience. It touches you in ways that you didn’t know possible. It makes an impact on kids. I REMEMBER each and every time we did as a child, I remember helping hatchlings on other beaches find their way back into the water. I remember being so amazed at these turtles size that I thought it was as big as a VW Bug when I was little.  This event only happens between April and Jule/July so if you are here during that time, it is well worth the effort to go and see these animals up close and personal.

Morning Find

It seems like everyday we find something new to explore.  Some days we need to go hunting for things at the beach, in the bush, in Christiansted, etc.  Other days, our find come to us.  Today was a case in point.  we opened the front door this morning and an AWFUL smell entered the house - almost like something was dying. My first thought was that the cat:

brought us a present and hid it somewhere over the weekend while trying to emulate the Easter Bunny. Then C found it, A yelled at me to come see, and I grabbed the camera.  What did we find you ask?

Tada! Here it is.......

WHAT IS THAT?!?!


It's a Clathrus ruber or a fungus in the stinkhorn family. It is also know as the latticed stinkhorn, red cage, or basket stinkhorn.  It feeds of decaying woody plant material, and is usually found alone in areas where there is mulch, leaf litter, grassy soil, etc.  The brown part is the sticky, stinky pollen.  It smells so bad to attract flies, ants, etc.  It really does smell bad, not as bad as 24 hour side of the road Caribbean road kill, but pretty close.  


Go find something and learn about it. Just remember if you see one of these guys, wear a gas mask!

The Rut

I find ourselves in a rut these days.  Know what I mean?

I have all these THINGS I want to get done, all these items on my to do list, all this info I want to pass on to A, all these fun ideas for games for C, this stuff called housework to do (not that I WANT to do it, it just needs to be done), all these fun just for me crafty projects I want to start and finish, and NOTHING, I mean NOTHING is getting done!  What's a Mom to do?

Yup, go exploring. Actually, that's what I wished I had done. Instead I spent the day going crazy.  I need to go out and grab my life by the horns and get going again.  Not today though. Not tomorrow either - we are busy running errands and doing volunteer modeling for a friend's online boutique that supports women in Guatemala.

Maybe I should just start over next week hmm?

St. Croix Environmental Hosts the Homeschoolers.

 I am not sure if The St. Croix Environmental Association (SEA), knew exactly what they were getting into we started speaking on the phone about doing a field day with the homeschoolers….. Whatever they expected, I hope that we surprised and impressed them with our kids depth and breath of knowledge.  Then again, maybe our kids were duds? Hmm, I will have to find out. 

What I do know if this…..We were on time, all the students were either wet or muddy, every single one of our students had big smiles on their faces at the end of the day, and the kids that I talked to thought it was neat and that they learned things.  I think that is a successful field trip.  SEA did a fantastic job of putting together activities for each of our age levels (K – 11), getting the kids to run around, touch, smell, and think about things that I am pretty sure most had not done before, and it was super well organized. 

I can only mention what I saw the kids doing, but the kids in K – 2^nd went on a beach scavenger hunt, talked about animals living in ponds and looked at pond scum. The 3^rd – 4^th graders waded into the wetlands, looked at what lives in the wetlands, learned about mangroves, how to tag and observe turtles when nesting, and talked about marine conservation. The 5^th – 6^th graders did a wetlands activity, bird watching, and beach exploration.  The 7^th – 12^th graders went seining along the shore for fish.

A was well prepared and was able to answer questions and ask her own intelligent questions – which made me proud but also a bit embarrassed. Especially when she asked how Turtles reproduce. I will give the presenter credit though because she didn’t bat an eye and answered her with a simple explanation of how male turtles have hooks in their flippers and actually hook the females “shoulders” which is why sometimes females have scars in that area. New factiod for us all.  A also brought me a black mangrove leaf that was covered in salt and we licked it to taste the salt. It tasted –salty.  I can’t see harvesting salt that way, but next time I’m at a beach and need salt for my sandwich I know which mangrove species to use.

 

One of the older girls thought it was cool that she got to catch baby barracuda and other fish. Since she had never held a barracuda before it was interesting. She did say that the lecture got a bit boring since it was so long.  At the end she told her mom that she wanted to go home and shower since she felt slimy. I love high school girls! She didn’t seem too upset by it though and she was smiling; although she is one of the nicest, smiliest girls I know as it is. 

If you ever get a chance to participate in one of SEA’s activities, do so. They are a great organization and they do a lot of good for our little slice of paradise.

I also want to thank VINE, the Virgin Islands Network of Environmental Educators for turning out on this field day. We look forward to doing many more things with them :) Check out their blog.

Reflections

This is it, the last day of 2011.  There will never be another day like it.  I have been in a reflective sort of mood since yesterday.  So many things have changed in my life, in our lives as a family this year.  We ended last year with my Dad’s unexpected passing, took Aislin out of school and started homeschooling, started some new traditions as a family, etc. 

It has been a year of growth, of regression, of togetherness, of change – it has been a year.  Would I give up any one aspect of this past year?  Other than the ability to make my Dad’s death not happen – no. Even that, though, has unified my small family, so would I give up the new found confidence that I have in spouse and myself because of the trials of my Dad’s passing – nope.  Do I wish our unity had come at a lesser price?  You betcha. 

Would I give up our sudden departure from traditional schooling for Aislin to home schooling? No way.  It has been an adventure, a ride, a period of growth for myself as a Mom, as a teacher, and a wife.  Home schooling has brought us joy, it has allowed my children to grow closer, it has tested my limits of patience, it has tested Stephen’s limits of what is an acceptable level of chaos. It has allowed me to mold Aislin, to help her grow academically, and as a responsible person. It has given me an opportunity to help Aislin become more confident in herself, to challenge her with her thoughts, and her beliefs.  It has given us a closeness that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

I am so glad that we live on St. Croix, where I have a great group of friends that I can turn to when the going got rough. I am thankful that some of those same friends can turn to me when their going got rough.  I love that fact,that I can call up any of my friends and say, “Drinks? Tonight?” and know that I will get at east one or two  takers,  that we can show up in sweats, or dressed up and not one of us will think  any less of the others for it.  I love the fact, that I can call up people and say, hey, I know it’s 4, but come on over for dinner, or drinks, or whatever tonight and no one cares if the house is upside down, the little monster is naked, or the chicken is over cooked.  I love that some of my good friends are neighbors that we can count on to babysit when Stephen and I need to escape the chaos of our house.

So, as we close out the year today, I sit and think, did we have a good year? Yes we did.  Did I learn anything from this year? Yes.

• Enjoy every moment and every person because you never know when you won’t have that anymore.
• Your children are unique and you should not expect them to do the same things as other people's children. 
• The laundry can wait – making memories with your kids or spouse is more important. 
• Treat everyone, even the bums on the street, as you want to be treated. 
• Tell your husband that you love him, even when you are mad at him and have visions of throttling him dancing before your eyes.
• Say what you mean and own it. 
• Don’t make excuses for yourself or other people.  
• You have no control over what other people do, only how you react to other people. 
• Remember the lessons that my Dad taught me, even if I didn’t want to hear them at the time. 

And I think the most important lesson that I learned this year was:

If God brought it to you, He will help you handle it.

Happy New Year!