Supervised Night Patrol - the real deal

Today is a regrouping day.

After a very productive, as successful-for practically-everyone-but me midnight-5am tagging session last night, we get the day to rest, meet with Emma, the Director, and have our first weekly meeting. 

Last night: it was a wonderfully star and 1/2 moonlit patrol, warm breezes reminding us of our tropic location, and 9 freshly trained RA's ready to apply and conquer.

Cata, our maestra, was shadowing our steps this night, instead of dictating them, to see how much we've understood.  golden stars for all!

s0 we start by walking on the high tide line: identify track type & direction, and see if the return track to sea is also visible (if not, then it means we've found treasure).  then follow path to nest, carefully and nondisturbingly observe and identify the stage the turtle is in:
1) arriving to nest spot
2) Cleaning / prepping bodypit -23 min
3) Digging egg chamber - 23 min
4) Laying Eggs (enters in trance, and this is where nest marking begins) - 15 min.
5) Covering egg Chamber with back flippers (my favorite).  allso the time to do all the remaining turtle duties. - 12 min.
6) Camouflaging (regaining energy, working here can get messy and painful) - 43min
7) back to sea

Last night i tried tagging a 1.09cm mama, one that was behaving phenomenously... yet i managed to F it up.  i did however, gain a better understanding as to the works of the pliers on flesh, the movement f the turtle when prepping to camouflage and how the tagger needs to move with it as to not notch the skin (which i did, - ouch).  now all i have to do it transfer brain understanding to my actions and presto.  sufices to say i was sort of blue from then on.  happy to see all the progress we did as a whole and how many turtles in prime positions we found in only 1/2 of a mile, but still kind of holding back tears because i hurt mine, which was my biggest fear. 

there's always next time :). 
overall, i know i was being hard on myself... but i just felt terrible that my amateur mistakes hurt this innocent trusting mother new to conservation research.  thankfully, Kata was there to ameliorate the sich/

We were able to mark 2 nests (one of which laid a stunning 164 healthy eggs!), and follow full protocol.  :) hurray for team tortuguero.
bueno, that was my evening. Thank you for reading and virtually joining me in this experience.
TTYL.  Altho.... for there to be a conversation, usually the other side needs to say something back :).  hint hint (comment!, ask questions.... poke fun).