Field Notes: July 2025

Green tutle love nest at Nature Valley, Montserrat.

In other news partly because of lack of funding plus poor visability we haven't done any in water surveys so far this year. But we have been observing behaviours and communicating with local fishers about sightings etc.

What's different this year is that the Green turtles are super happy - mating non stop in a small bay area, called. " Nature Valley." They are literally in the surf to ~50 m from shore. So chilled - we certainly don't even want to disturb them.

Yesterday we observed 5 mating pairs , maybe around 20 in the water. Wherelse in the region, can you see mamting pairs so close to shore?

There will be a big beach party, " Calasplash" next to this beach a couple weeks from now. I hope the noise and excitement doesn't scatter them away.

This area that the Greens are loving is affected by lahar outflows, here ghauts from the volcano wash sediments/ash etc. in the water and we are noticing that the visibility is increasingly poor - worsened by flash floods of May 18th, 2025. It was shortly after the flash flood that the turtles started aggregating in the Nature Valley Area.

The sad reality is the majority of these nests will wash away as we have no system for moving nests to safer grounds or any hatchery --- satelittle or otherwise. We are trrying to figure out how to be most useful in our turtle work here , while communicating with UK partners + fisheries but we feel a bit in limbo - with no real clarity or firm plan as yet decided on what happens this year. Nontheless we continue to do what we can. I think our objective this August is to try to secure some field training- in-water turtle tagging perhaps - will stay connected.

Veta.