An Island in the Sea.

The chronicles of living in the most remote place on earth; Ascension Island.

[anislandinthesea]

Internet's being disastrous, so this one'll be short! This week was spent mostly clearing the path down through Breakneck Valley with Charlie and Kenickie. It's a beautiful historic path that goes down past the water catchment and the Marine Barracks at the top of the mountain and follows the valley down the mountain and ends at the Pines. The Pines are norfolk pines, grown because of their long, straight trunks which make excellent ship masts.  We also did the Letterbox and Northwest Point bird monitoring, and lots of the masked boobies at the Letterbox have fledged and left, whereas many of the noddies at NW Point appear to have failed.  The turtle season is basically at an end, with a grand total of 6 coming up onto Long Beach on Thursday night! The number of hatchlings is still high, but starting to drop now. I managed to get some video of one swimming! I'm still trying to edit it into something actually worth watching, but will post it asap.  This weekend I finished my BSAC Sports Diver qualification, and to celebrate, the other divers I qualified with and I went on two awesome boat dives. On the way back, we bumped into a pod of about 15 dolphins, circled around with them a little, before stopping the boat to jump in and see them under water! I was so upset that my camera had run out of batteries during the days dives and I couldn't get an footage of the dolphins. However someone else had their camera, so there should be some stuff I'll try to get a hold of!  Right, that's it for last week. I'm off back to the UK for a brief (4 week) trip on Friday (the 21st), so not much exciting conservation-ey type stuff will be posted, but I'll still write something up about what I've been up to!

[anislandinthesea]

Well, this past week has been incredible. I have met so many new people, and learned an incredible amount. We hosted a conference for land owners and conservationists from the Falkland Islands, and St Helena, with visiting speakers from Kew Gardens. Over the course of the week, we learned about monitoring, management plans, designation of protected areas, enforcing protected areas, invasive species management, and in-situ and ex-situ species protection. On Friday, I was lucky enough to be invited out on a boat dive with the Shallow Marine Surveys Group who have been visiting from the Falklands. Some incredibly cool people, and got to dive parts of the island I've never seen before. They had some awesome kit, and I'm hoping to get hold of some of the photos; More to come on that front. 

I've been working on my BSAC Sports Diver qualification, and successfully passed my theory test. We had our first practical lesson today, and got to do all sorts of exciting things like deploy a delayed surface marker buoy and surface towing of an unconscious diver, as well as less exciting, but still necessary, things like navigation. Not long 'till I'm at the next stage in my diving experience!! Turtles have declined massively, with hardly any coming up on Long Beach, I believe the total was under 20 this last Thursday night.  On a more social note, we had a big party up the mountain at the Administrators Residence in honour of the Queen's birthday. A wonderful event with everyone dressed all posh. It was great! :) Bank Holiday tomorrow, so going walking with Charlie and Kenickie, then off to English Bay for a beach day!

[anislandinthesea]

[anislandinthesea]

This week has been spent clearing Elliot's in preparation for the Protected Areas Workshop. We installed a brand new picnic bench, and finished clearing the Ptisana restoration site, as well as planting some Hystiopteris,  a native fern that grows around the Ptisana, and the two species of fern support each other. It will be interesting to see how the restoration effort pans out over the next couple of years. Really not that exciting in terms of work, but working up the mountain in fantastic weather has been wonderful! On Wednesday, we had the first proper rain in roughly two and a half months. Very welcome, as the drought was starting to make itself felt. St Helena has had to take a water donation from Ascension, as when the ship arrived here, we were told that St Helena only had enough water for 6 more days. I hope that the little that Ascension was able to send will tide them over until the rains come. Managed to get a dive or two in, and tomorrow I have my first confined water dive lesson for my next dive qualification: BSAC Sports Diver. This qualification will allow me to dive deeper, safer, and for longer, as it has in depth gas calculations, rescue procedures and skill requirements.  That's all for now, more to come soon.

P.S. excuse the crappy photo editing. Rushing through photoshop on a borrowed computer...it's better than nothing!!!

[anislandinthesea]

Last week was quite dull in terms of conservation stuff, but in the area of my life in general, pretty exciting. I've spent a lot of time trying to prepare for the next stage in my life: university. I'm waiting for confirmation from Aberdeen Uni that they'll allow me to exchange the course I initially applied for to one that I'd actually like to study. I received a letter of allocation to accommodation, which I'm taking as a positive sign...they hopefully wouldn't allocate me to accommodation if they didn't intend to accept me. I'm also in a bit of a unique predicament: I was born in Kenya, have a British passport, went to boarding school in Scotland, grew up in Germany, and now live on a UK Overseas Territory. When I applied to uni last year, I was living in Germany which made me an EU student. But now, I really don't know where I'm at in terms of fee status. One of the other things I need to figure out is  a decent spec laptop for a reasonable price, any suggestions welcome!!  At work, we've been preparing for a big protected areas conference starting next week. We've got lots of exciting people coming out to the island, from organizations like the RSPB, and the St Helena National Trust. It's going to hopefully be quite an exciting and eventful workshop. Last Wednesday, we had Deirdre, a doctor who had been working down on South Georgia and in the Antarctic and was passing through Ascension on her way back to Skye, volunteer with us. We gladly accepted her help. Due to the nature of the work we were doing, (noddy nest monitoring out at North East Point), we were unreachable through radio for most of the day and we arrived back at the office to find almost the entire police force waiting for us. Unbeknownst to us, she had somehow managed to leave the airhead without a valid entry permit. The police had been searching for her all day. She was informed she was going to be on the next flight back to the UK (on Friday). This left her with two days with little to do, so she came out working with us for the rest of the week. She turned out to be pretty cool, despite being a Scottish spy.  The frigatebird chick out on the Letterbox is doing fantastically, and is almost full-sized, and looking quite vulture like. I'm hoping I'll be able to see her fledge before heading off to uni. That way I'll have witnessed her entire 'childhood,' from egg to hatching to fledging.  Turtle numbers have dropped crazily, with us only having 50 on Long Beach last Friday! Not long now until the end of the season.  That's all for now, more to come soon! :)

[anislandinthesea]

This week has seen me return to work up the mountain on Elliot's Pass. We have a restoration site for Ptisana purpurascens (http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/43922/0) situated roughly halfway along the path. Weeds, which needed removal, had begun to sprout amongst the ferns, and recent heavy rains had caused a landslide at the base of the site (which is conveniently located in a steep ravine...). Initially we cleared the path to the entrance of the fenced site, which in the three months since it had last been cleared had rapidly become overgrown with ginger, before moving on to the clearance of the landslide. The soil and rock had taken with it the 'oracles' of 13 of the large ferns, so careful excavation of those specimens was required before clearing the remainder of the landslide. In order to weed the site, we set up ropes at the highest points of the site, and proceeded to rappel down the steep cliff face, weeding as we went. Overall, quite nerve-wracking! The work n Elliot's took up most of the week, and on Thursday we had a team day up on Bishop's Path. The aim of the day was to clear some of the banks along the path of vegetation in order to monitor the recolonization rates of some of the island's endemic and native bryophytes. It was a fantastically clear day up at the top of the mountain, and we managed to get loads done! In terms of turtles, the Long Beach number was a severely diminished 67 attempts, a significant difference from the massive peak back in March. I'm looking forward to seeing the final formatted data which should show a wonderful bell curve over timespan of the season. Hatchlings are becoming an increasingly commonplace, although I'm yet to go out with my camera and get some good pics! That's all from me for this week, more to come soon!

[anislandinthesea]

Bonus video :)

[anislandinthesea]

Wow. So much has happened in the two months since my last post. We have had two MSc (Masters of Science) students come out here to do their field projects. One of them is studying the diet and distribution of populations of the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the other is determining the spawning locations and areas for recruitment to the population of Ascension's endemic land crab, Johngarthia legostoma. These new projects have been really interesting to take part in. I have been helping with monitoring the numbers of spawning crabs at many of the beaches on the eastern side of the island, which required a couple camping trips to some of the more remote areas such as Crystal Bay, Pillar Bay and Spire Beach. The crab surveys involved clambering around the cliffs and rocks hunting for land crabs in the night, and for each one we found, we would record its gender and whether it had eggs, and then mark it with a paint marker to prevent multiple counts. The only monitoring of the land crabs had previously only occurred on a single beach, North East Bay, and along the roads. We found some good data showing other significant spawning sites, as well as finding some of the various stages of the development the crabs go through after hatching (megalops, and first crab stages, which hadn't been seen in over 50 years).

The work with rats is a little less glamorous; We've been setting live traps in a grid overnight, then collecting the rats we catch and killing them through cervical dislocation before returning to our 'lab' and dissecting them and examining stomach and faecal matter. We record all  of what we find the rats have been eating, and so far have some promising results. We recently had a visit from some bryologists (people who study bryophytes, which are mosses, hornworts and liverworts) who taught us a little about the numerous endemic bryophytes, and we may have found  a species new to science, as well as numerous species not previously recorded on Ascension. Mosses, hornworts and liverworts are astonishingly beautiful plants when looked at properly: 

In terms of turtles, we reached peak nesting towards the end of March with a massive record-breaking number of 423 in one night on Long Beach, and since then numbers have been declining. Peak hatching will occur over the next couple weeks, and I'll be sure to upload loads of photos & videos of the adorable little things.

I've managed to power past the 20 dive line, and will hopefully starting a BSAC course to advance to the next level.Here's this video of a little octopus I filmed on my GoPro (parents got it for me for my 18th, best present ever!!!) and some more dive photos/videos to follow in a little bit! That's all for now, and now that things have calmed down a little, I'll be back to posting every week. :)

Photo credits to Dr Sylvia Pressel, Prof. Jeff Duckett and Catriona Regnier-Mckellar

[anislandinthesea]

Some photos from my trip out to Boatswain Bird Island, because I wasn't up to writing loads. 

[anislandinthesea]

This week has been pretty exciting! A simple start on Monday, we spent the day up Green Mountain putting in the signs for visitors to read about the endemic plant species. To get them stable we had to dig deep holes, and then wedge rocks around the posts and tamp them down. Lack of sophisticated tools meant that we used a handle of a grubber (St Helenian for a mattock) to do the wedging and tamping! Tuesday was a peaceful day up at the Green Mountain Restoration Site, doing some weeding around the endemics. On Tuesday evening I got to go on a night dive with a marine biologist based in the Falklands with the intent of collecting specimens of a newly discovered species of parasitic snail which live on the underside of these large, brown sea cucumbers. Getting tiny snails into little pots using tweezers underwater whilst being pushed around by the swell was a real challenge, but in the end everything turned out well.

Wednesday was a bit of a change from the usual team days we have here in Conservation. As the visiting marine biologist from the Falklands was here, he got us to catch and dissect some fish. We first identified their gender and maturity stage, which involved slicing their bellies open and rummaging through their innards in search of gonads (a few of which we preserved in pots for later examination by professionals), before sawing open their skulls, removing their brains and taking out two tiny little bones from inside their inner ears called otiliths. These minute bones can be used (through some complex sciency means) to fairly precisely determine the age of the fish. What I found to truly be the most exciting part of this whole thing, was my chance to try my hand at spearfishing with a Hawaiian Sling, which is basically a trident with a big rubber band on one end that you stretch and then release to impale the desired fish. Sounds pretty brutal, but it's honestly not that bad! 

Thursday I headed out to North West Point again to mark new Brown Noddy nests, and monitor the ones from last week. Once again there was such an abundance of new nests that we ran out of tags. Next time we'll take double the number of tags, just in case! The week has wound down to a pleasantly relaxed close, as I spent today clearing the path up to the Green Mountain Restoration Site, so that visitors can see some of the work we're doing without having to battle through jungle to get there.  I'm really excited for tomorrow, I get to go on a trip up onto Boatswain Bird Island! I'll actually be allowed onto the island, and we'll be tagging frigatebirds with some satellite tags, as well as setting some pitfall traps for invertebrates. It should be good, and I will post some photos tomorrow!

That's it for this week though, more to come soon!

[anislandinthesea]

This week has seen a slight drop in the number of turtles coming up on Long Beach, with just 230 coming up on Thursday night. We’re hoping that it is just an off week, due to the rough seas we have been having and not an earlier peak in the season.

Monday and Tuesday this week were spent tidying up the regrowth on Elliot’s Pass in preparation for the official reopening of the path on the 2nd of March. Where less than a month ago we had finished clearing a perfect trail around the mountain, we found fresh shoots of the fern Christella, low hanging branches which had previously formed pleasant natural arches, and the ever present and rapidly growing ginger stalks. Wednesday was a team building day, and rather than spend the time weeding the restoration site just below the peak of Green Mountain, the whole conservation team worked together to carry heavy timber signposts around Elliot’s to a number of spots, as well as big bags of rocks with which to stabilise the posts once buried in the ground. These signs will inform the public on the endemic and native plants found along the path, so that they know about the species which naturally occur here on Ascension

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In other areas, the sooty terns are looking promising, as many pairs have re-laid in an area previously abandoned due to failed nests because of rat predation. We’re hoping to start a new hatching success monitoring site in the coming week, which will hopefully be more successful than the 100% failure rate of the previous hatching and fledging test sites. On Thursday I spent the day out at North West Point, which has some of the worst terrain to walk on that I have ever seen. To get out to the headlands where we are monitoring the nests of Brown Noddies (a small seabird with soft brown feathers and a grey patch on top of their heads) and Yellow-billed Tropicbirds (white seabirds, with black streaks on the backs of their wings, yellow beaks, and a pair of extremely long tail feathers which trail behind them as they fly), we had to cross a lava flow consisting of large, sharp boulders, all precariously balanced on top of each other where the volcano dumped them. Walking across this stuff was terrifying; the slightest misstep could result in an incredibly painful fall. After about an hour of walking on this stuff, we stopped for lunch, and we sought shelter from the unrelenting sun in a stunning little cave with the waves around our feet. When we finally reached the headlands, we were confronted with so many new Noddy nests to tag, that we ran out of pegs with which to mark them. 

That's all for this week, more to come next Friday! (I know this post was late, busy life combined with extraordinarily slow internet access makes writing on a schedule difficult to keep to. Sorry!)

[anislandinthesea]

This week hasn't been all that exciting in terms of activities. We completed the workshop with Marcella on Wednesday. Over the five days of the course, we reorganized our shade houses up in the Green Mountain nursery, weeded and re-potted various endemic and native plants, learned about seed collection methods, built compost bays so we can make compost for the plants we grow in the nursery, and planted a display bed of endemic species to show tourists and visitors to the island what we are working to save.

In terms of turtles, the week has been busier than ever before, with record numbers for February on both Long Beach and Pan Am. At the start of the week we had roughly 120 turtles a night on Pan Am, where last year’s numbers were closer to 60, Long Beach reached 240 on Thursday night; the first time more than 200 have come up before the end of February. It remains to be seen whether or not the turtles are merely early this year, or if it is a mammoth year in terms of population. These big numbers of nesting turtles means that we have had more strandings than usual as well. On Monday morning we had a behemoth of a turtle stuck behind the beach hut on Pan Am, one of the biggest that my coworkers (one of whom has done a PhD on the Ascension population of green turtles) have ever seen. Tuesday we had a smaller one stuck on the rocks of Dead Man’s Beach, and Wednesday we were called out to the Northeast of the island because of a turtle stuck in a rock pool so deep that if I stood in it, it would have come up to my chest. It was nearly impossible to get her to leave the cool of the water to go around the rocks into the open sea, but very satisfying to see her shell disappear beneath the waves!

  That’s all that’s really happened this week, not boring, but not quite as exciting as the past few ones. More to come next week!

[anislandinthesea]

Well this past week saw the end of my first month on Ascension. The time here has really flown past. It has been a whole month since I landed on on this desolate, barely populated rock in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, and in this short time, I have experienced rescuing stranded turtles, the hatching of a bird unseen on the mainland in over 180 years, colonies of over a quarter of a million sooty terns, working with plants which occur nowhere else in the world, diving in crystal clear waters with incredible marine life, and working with some crazily talented people. 

The past week began with some path clearance on Rupert's and Cronk's paths on Monday. Tuesday was spent checking out the newly down-covered Ascension frigatebird chick, as well as a quick examination of the (currently broken) frigatebird decoys, which consist of garden herons, chopped up, rebuilt and painted to resemble nesting adults in an attempt at getting them to nest on the mainland once again. Sadly no success, but we had an incredible view over Boatswain Bird Island from the cliffs of the Letterbox whilst we ate our lunch.

Wednesday was an absolutely incredible day, a group of us from conservation were invited along to assist with setting up a gantry on Boatswain Bird Island, to allow us to get onto the island for our future trips onto the island to monitor the seabird populations, and study the endemic pseudo-scorpions which live only on the tiny piece of rock that is Boatswain Bird. We didn't do much actual helping, we more or less were just along for the boat ride. And what a trip it was! We saw thousands of birds, a couple of dolphins, and a whole new perspective of the minuscule dot on the map that is my temporary home.

Thursday was the start of a 5-day workshop with botanical horticulturist Marcella Corcoran. During the workshop, we have been working on techniques and protocols for working with Ascension's native and endemic plants. It has been a wonderful workshop so far, and I have learned a phenomenal amount about plants and feel like I am keeping up with the conservation biologists, a big step up from someone who nearly failed biology. 

The weekend was filled with my, now usual, schedule of Saturday morning swim training with the island kids, swim training on my own, and a Hash and après in the afternoon. Sunday I went for a midday dive with my neighbours off Pan Am beach in the hopes of seeing some turtles, but sadly we only came across one.

This week, we resumed the workshop with Marcella, and have been working with seeds and plants in the shade houses on Green Mountain. It's nice to spend some time out of the baking, unrelenting heat of Georgetown, up in the cool mountain air. Once the workshop is finished (tomorrow is the last day) I will hopefully have an opportunity to take part in another marine life survey around the wreck of the Sudan, which should be exciting, and I would love to get some photos to share here. 

That's all for this week's post, apologies for the delay, internet here on the island is proving to be a truly problematic situation.

[anislandinthesea]

why do you rake the turtle tracks...

We rake the tracks so that we can measure the number of turtles that come up to lay during the night, and from there we can project population estimates. If we didn't, the fresh tracks would be lost among the old ones, making an estimate of the nightly numbers pretty much impossible.

[anislandinthesea]

[anislandinthesea]

Yet another week has passed and it feels like they are absolutely racing away. I'm terrified my six months will be over too soon and it will be time to head off to university!

Last Friday was an incredible day, I went out with a couple of people from the RSPB to the Sooty Tern colonies at Mars Bay and Waterside. We inspected the plot where we were monitoring hatching success, 40 nests, which sadly had all been the victims of rat predation. The adults had abandoned their empty eggs, leaving barren, guano stained ground in their wake. We then set up a different plot to measure the fledging success of hatched chicks, which hopefully will survive the rats! Our next task was to recapture ringed birds. This involved inspecting the right leg of every bird we could see for a tiny metal ring with a number printed on it, and then catching those that had them. Surprisingly, despite there being thousands of unringed birds, we managed to capture an astonishing 13! 

The weekend was a welcome break from all the hard conservation, and Saturday morning started with some wonderful croissants from the Naafi, before helping out coaching the swim team. The afternoon was then spent on a Hash, my third. On a person's third Hash, they receive their Hash name. After the walk, the hash leader, (hash name: The Last Turtle Head of Doom or TLTHoD) drew a circle in the volcanic ash on the ground and bade me enter. The other Hashers filled plastic cups with water from a cooler in TLTHoD's truck which he claimed had sat in his freezer for two whole days. After a brief spiel about the history of the Hash names, a talk about my fathers follicle situation, my underagedness, how TLTHoD's below average German skills are to blame for the confusion in diminutives (-lein and -chen) and various digs at me for being supposedly "lazy" (I missed a single beach raking!) I was christened (literally christened, I was doused in icy water!) with the name Herr-lein Slacker. Yay. 

Monday saw me once again up Green Mountain, working to clear the historical paths to a level of passability. I was issued a sword and a pair of gloves and we set to work on Cronks and Ruperts paths, which travel around the North West side of the Mountain. Tuesday was sadly another visit to the power station's wind turbines to collect the corpses of birds struck by the propellers. 

On Wednesday, I had what has, without a doubt, been the best work day of my entire life. I got to assist with a marine survey. This involved kitting up for a midday dive, heading out to English Bay and going for a wonderfully warm, relaxing dive. It was amazing! Because it was my first survey dive, I just followed along at a distance, watching and learning, but next time I get to actually do the surveying which will involve counting the numbers of each species of fish and we see. To say that I'm excited for the next one is an understatement!

Thursday and today was spent working up on Cronks and Rupert's paths again. Sadly now all the excitement of clearing paths with a sword has faded, and it's just hard work. It is still tremendous fun however! :) This weekend I've got another marine survey dive lined up with a guy who is a big name in the area, which should be exciting, and then a wonderful Burn's Night dinner planned for the evening.  That's all for this week!  

[anislandinthesea]

Long Beach, The beach I help rake every Thursday and Friday. Today we raked the tracks of 101 turtles; 202 tracks. Hard work in the hot sun.