Tortuguitas!

Hello all! This week I posted signs at the school and made an awkward announcement to all of the students to invite them to come to the library. Something like, "Hello everyone, I am working at the library at the Turtle Refuge and love visitors and can help with English homework and I have games and I have books and on Saturdays there are art projects and a movie and I hope that everyone comes because the library is fun and I like people visiting and I can help with homework and English." They looked dubious that anyone as grammatically challenged as I could help with any sort of homework, but I assured them that my English was better than my Spanish. And now kids come, almost every day! After school gets out at 3, there is a group of high school kids that comes for English lessons; just lessons, not homework. We've been working on the basics, like the alphabet, simple sentences, animals, body parts - a big group of awkward teenage boys sang "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" on Thursday, it was great! Also, last night something wonderful happened! I was on turtle patrol as usual with some other guys that work here (Greddy, Fran and McDonald) and we found a nest of hatchlings just starting to come up out of the sand. We were all excited, and then we looked around with our flashlights and found...HUNDREDS of hatchlings! Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds! We counted over thirty nests just in a small portion of the beach, with 50+ babies from each nets. It was incredible! It was all of the hatchlings from the September arribada, and Greddy said that I was lucky because it was the largest number of hatchlings that they've seen all year! We stayed there for over five hours, chasing off vultures, crabs, and one ENORMOUS toad that was hopping about and gobbling up baby turtles as fast as he could. The only problem was that we stayed on the far end of the beach for too long and the tide came up, which meant that the river that we have to cross to get back to the Refuge (usually knee high during low tide) was over chest high and we had to swim across, clothes and all. And there are CROCODILES in that river!! Not going to lie, I was completely petrified. Then, this morning, things were pretty slow at the library because kids won't show up until later this afternoon for the movie, so I decided to go for a walk down the beach. And I found MORE babies hatching out of a nest on the beach! Nobody was there and the vultures were going to town, so I had to run around wildly throwing sticks and shouting to get them to go away. Eventually someone saw me prancing around like a lunatic and came over to help me. The turtles must have been partially dug up by the vultures or something, because they hardly ever come out to hatch in the middle of the day because it is way too hot for them, so the babies were having a lot of trouble making it to the ocean because the sand was boiling hot. So I gathered them up and sprinted back and forth to the wet, cooler sand to help them make it. I hope that they're ok! It certainly is an uphill battle for the poor little things. Since these babies hatched during the day, I finally got to take some pictures! Hope you enjoy them. More on facebook! Love you all! Happy Halloween!