Greece: Archelon
Volunteering with loggerhead sea turtles
My third and final volunteering project was in Chania, Crete, with the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece called 'Archelon'. I volunteered there for four weeks, from June 2nd to June 30th, 2017. You can volunteer with Archelon for a minimum of four weeks, or one if you are a returning volunteer. Because this was the third time I was leaving home in 4 months, I'll be honest in saying that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about leaving yet again by myself for a country that I didn't know, to do something that I didn't know much about with people that I didn't know. A lot of unknowns for a girl who likes to control pretty much every aspect of her life (although now that I look back on it, it was very therapeutic). But, once again, armed with all my courage and determination, while also doing a healthy amount of internal screaming, I found myself embarking on my very last journey of the year, although certainly not least.
I arrived on a very hot Thursday afternoon (which I later realized was really not that hot for Crete, and I was in for a month of scalding heat and sunburns) at Camping Hania, practically crumbling beneath my backpack that was bigger than me, my enormous suitcase and my camping gear. I was welcomed by the two project leaders (one monitoring leader and one public awareness leader, both previous volunteers) and the other volunteers and given a tour of the camping site, which definitely didn't prevent me from getting lost 2 or 3 times. Typical.
Before telling you about my month with Archelon, I will briefly explain what the organisation does and how it works. Archelon was created in 1983 in Zakynthos, 6 years after its founders, Dimitris and Anna Margaritoulis, fell asleep on a beach and woke up next to a nesting loggerhead sea turtle. At the time, the scientific community knew little about these animals, or that they nested in Greece at all. Having discovered the great number of sea turtles that were nesting every year in Zakynthos, they began to see the importance of protecting the beaches and started a monitoring project which eventually led to the creation of the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece, or Archelon, in 1983. Today, the non-profit organisation counts 13 employees and several volunteer-based projects around Greece, with its two biggest in Zakynthos and Kyparissia. I decided to volunteer in one of the three projects on Crete, an island where the number of Caretta Caretta nests are dropping each year, mainly due to the growing tourism industry taking over the nesting beaches. Archelon's work is crucial to the protection of this endangered species and focuses on conservation, monitoring, research and public awareness.
The Volunteering Project
Our tasks as volunteers were divided between two of Archelon's pillars of work: monitoring and public awareness. On a typical day, every volunteer had two shifts, generally a monitoring shift and a public awareness shift.
Monitoring includes any work that is focused on gathering scientific data about the sea turtles and tracking their activity throughout the season, from nesting in June and July to hatching in August and September. While I was there, the main monitoring shift that had to be done every day was the morning survey, which meant walking along the nesting beaches in the mornings looking for turtle activity. In Chania Bay, there are 14 km of nesting beaches that are monitored every day by Archelon volunteers during morning surveys. Now when I say morning, I mean MORNING. See, I was used to living the lifestyle of waking up at 11AM and having breakfast at a time when normal people would be having lunch. Boy did I get a wake up call (no pun intended) when I started volunteering for Archelon and had to wake up at 4:30AM (yep that's right) roughly every other day for morning survey. You might think "well that's fine, just sleep in on the days you don't have morning survey". Well turns out the combination of sleeping in a tent and living in Cretan weather during the summer has you crawling out of your tent gasping for air at 8AM. Only when you volunteer with Archelon do you really learn to master the art of napping literally anywhere and anytime. Ok, getting back on topic. The nesting beaches of Chania are divided into 3 areas, each surveyed every morning by a group of 2 volunteers. The goal of morning survey is to have discovered and recorded any turtle tracks, nesting attempts or actual nests before any tourists have the chance to cover the tracks or damage the nest, hence the early hour.
Tracks often led to nesting attempts, which is when the turtle tests out the sand to see if it is suitable for a nest. There are two types of nesting attempts: a swim, when the turtle tests the sand while moving, and a body pit, when she tests the sand without moving forward, which kind of looks like she's making a sand angel with her flippers. Pictured is a nesting attempt I discovered while on morning survey where the turtle came up on the beach on the right, made a swim and then a body pit, and finally made her way back to the sea on the left, without making a nest. When nesting attempts were found, we always had to dig the last attempt just to make sure that there wasn't a nest, and as we dug her attempt, we realized that the reason why she didn't make a nest was probably that the sand was too hard and compact in that area.
A few days after I arrived on the project, on the 5th of June, I was lucky enough to be on the morning survey that found the very first nest of the season in Chania (pictured). The turtle had made a swim and then went on to lay a nest right underneath the mound in the middle of the picture. We guarded the nest while waiting for the project leader to arrive and 'bravely' fended off some dogs to prevent them from digging up the eggs and harming the nest. As this was the first nest of the season, we had to be shown how to dig a nest in order to find where the egg chamber exactly was. We found the top egg after around 30 minutes of digging. It was truly a magical moment, seeing that egg buried in the sand, knowing that there were about a hundred more right underneath, little creatures waiting to come out and face the many challenges ahead. After finding the eggs, we covered them back up and made a makeshift tripod out of bamboo to protect it before coming back the next day to place a proper cage on the very first nest of the season.
Before moving on to another part of the volunteering work, I just have to tell you about the very last morning survey I went on. We were almost positive that we would find a nest, as groups from the previous days had all found nesting attempts on that area of the beach. So we set out on the beach at sunrise, and sure enough, we found three tracks. But that wasn't all we would be finding. After a while, we came across what the project leader called the strangest tracks he had ever encountered. We took 10 solid minutes to laugh at the absurdity of those tracks (which were made of at least 5 or 6 loops and turns) before taking on the task of figuring them out. We could see a camouflage, which is what turtles make after having laid a nest by flipping sand over a large area so as to confuse any predators about the exact location of the eggs. Being almost positive that we would find a nest underneath the camouflage despite the very strange loops and turns, we started digging to find the top egg. There we were, under the increasingly high sun, sat in the sand digging an enormous crater under the amused and very confused look of tourists. Usually, the top egg is located at a depth of 20 to 30 cm under the surface of the sand, but we eventually found the top egg 52 cm deep. We ended up digging a hole, for 3 and a half hours, of 4 by 2 meters, 50 cm deep. By the end, we were both drenched with sweat, severely dehydrated and had lost our minds somewhere between the second and third hour of digging. But that wasn’t the end of my very memorable last morning survey. Because the nest was located too close to the sea and had a risk of being inundated, we had to relocate it, which means taking out every single egg from the chamber, digging a similar chamber somewhere safe, and then putting the eggs back in the same order. I was charged with tallying the number of eggs that were taken out of the original nest. I was readying myself for a long relocation of about 100 eggs, so imagine my surprise when after having drawn my 6th tally, I heard the words "that's it..." Turns out there were only 6 eggs in the nest, 5 definitely too small to host any kind of life, and one in the shape of a sausage, equally doomed. We relocated the nest nonetheless, with no hope that it would ever hatch, sadly. Although we were extremely surprised to find only 6 eggs and in such bad shape, it did explain why the turtle had been so confused going back out to sea - she knew something was wrong with the nest that she had just made.
The second aspect of the volunteer work was public awareness, which involved talking to tourists and anyone at all that was interested in sea turtles, answering their questions and raising awareness about the fact that an endangered species was laying eggs on the very beaches they had probably been sunbathing on. In addition to that, we also tried raising funds during our public awareness shifts, as Archelon is a non-profit organisation that solely relies on donations from the public. The main public awareness shift was the kiosk, pictured on the right, located in the old town. This information kiosk was run by volunteers from 10 AM to 10 PM every day in 3 hour shifts, and consisted in standing inside or outside of the kiosk and as I previously said, talking to tourists about sea turtles and raising awareness as well as funds. Now you can imagine how asking passing tourists "Do you know about the sea turtles of Chania?" and having conversations with strangers can be pretty daunting for a person with social anxiety who basically embodies the word 'awkward'. But, this year being all about stepping out of my comfort zone, I decided to embrace the awkwardness and go for it. Although the situation did take some getting used to, I actually ended up enjoying talking to strangers about something that I had come to know about very well and that I was passionate about. I found it extremely rewarding to see someone who didn't know a thing about sea turtles genuinely care about what I had to say and leave the conversation with a newfound awareness and respect for these endangered species, or parents walking up to us with their children and telling us that they want to teach them about the importance of conservation and would like to know more about the sea turtles.
The other public awareness shift that we had was the information table, which had the same concept and purpose as the kiosk, but it was a table that we would set up in hotels, to interact with any guests that were interested in the sea turtles, and once again, raise awareness and funds. Now these hotels went from fancy to VERY VERY FANCY, and the feeling of being out of place was quite real when I was standing in a hotel with a marble interior and delicious breakfast smells coming from every direction while wearing a shirt that hadn't been washed in a long time, having eaten a slice of bread and leftover pasta for breakfast and knowing that I would once again be sleeping on a very thin air mattress on the ground that night. But, standing there with my dirty shirt and enormous bags under my eyes, I realized that I wouldn't want to trade the experience of the Archelon camping life for anything in the world (except maybe for waffles, but that's an exception).
The last shift that we had to do was called 'beach markers', and while it didn't really fit in either of the monitoring or public awareness categories, it was necessary work nonetheless. When nests are found on the beach during morning survey, it is essential for monitoring work and for data collection to know exactly where it is located. That is why Archelon has been using beach markers, which are geographical points of reference located roughly every 30m along the back of the beach. Whenever a nest was found, we would measure the distance from the nest to the two nearest beach markers on either side and to the shoreline, so as to create a 'triangulation' and to be able to later find exactly where the nest is. This year, our job was to make new beach markers, as the previous ones were much farther apart than 30m and very often erased. A typical shift would consist in painting on new beach markers, which meant doing a meticulous job of measuring from the last made marker, painting, taking GPS coordinates, recording and, of course, having to explain what we were doing to confused tourists and angry business owners who didn't understand why a couple of tired looking people in blue shirts were painting a number on a tree located in front of their cafe. Of course, they were sometimes also very nice to us and offered us water bottles, which we gladly accepted, and sometimes even raki shots, very representative of Greek hospitality but which we couldn't accept as it is not allowed to drink on the job. Still, a pretty amusing reminder that I was indeed in a Southern European country.
While this shift might seem less eventful than the others, I did have one very adventurous beach marker shift on a day of big waves and rising tide. We were supposed to be painting a couple of beach markers on a tall wall at the back of a very narrow strip of beach and we got caught in the tide and backed against the wall as massive waves started crashing onto us. It ended with all of us getting soaking wet, one volunteer having to chase after one of her flip-flops that was being washed out to sea, me having to chase after our paint bucket that was suffering the same fate, and our measuring tape falling in the commotion and getting large amounts of sand and seawater inside of it. But, after we spent an hour untangling the tape and getting the sand out, and after I had thrown away my socks and thoroughly washed my sneakers, it was pretty fun to be able to tell our very hyperbolic 'near death experience' to the others back at camp over a not-so-warm-anymore dinner.
My Thoughts
I couldn't have hoped for a better way to end this crazy wild ride of a year. Archelon truly was once again a life-changing experience for me, and although I admit some parts of it were pretty hard, it was definitely worth it and I loved every second.
First and foremost, I met some amazing people during my month on Crete that I am so grateful for. I will say this again, but every time I go out on an adventure like this one, this is always the part that I dread the most: having to meet new people, trying not to be too awkward in the first days and making new friends. I speak for all socially awkard people when I say it's hard. Hard, but definitely worth it. I will never forget the experiences I had with my friends at Archelon: sleepily grunting at each other at 4:30 in the morning, collectively napping in the car and on the Lidl parking lot while waiting for everyone to finish morning survey, going to the beach in between shifts, putting my incredibly questionable cooking skills to the test, and having dinner with everyone at the end of a very full day while laughing about everything and anything. They were really an amazing bunch of friends and they helped me so much to grow in self-confidence and be myself.
As for the work, I really enjoyed being able to do direct conservation work (a.k.a. protecting the nests of an endangered species) and see the impact that I made. If it hadn't been for our cages and daily monitoring, some nests would have been destroyed by tourists, businesses, sunbeds or even the high tide, and a lot of eggs would never have made it. It's so incredibly rewarding to not only know that you're directly protecting thousands of endangered animals, but also to see the impact that you can make on people just by talking to them about an issue that's very close to your heart and raising awareness.
I am so thankful for my work with Archelon. Although, I'll admit, it gave me bags under my eyes, an intense newfound craving for waffles and breakfast foods, the ability to sleep literally anywhere and a heatstroke while looking for an injured turtle in the harbour, it most importantly gave me incredible friends and allowed me to build my confidence, my knowledge and my drive to continue working in conservation. And I wouldn't change any of that for the world.
For more information about Archelon, please visit their website: www.archelon.gr