Early Patrols, Heavy Hearts & Tiny Miracles 🌅🐢

We didn’t have much time to settle in at the Cape…

Barely after dropping our backpacks in our little cabin named "High Times" (more on that another time), we were already sitting down with the Ecolodge team for a late briefing. The most important lessons of the evening: Every helping hand counts. And: From now on, sleep is an absolute luxury.

We are right in the middle of the peak nesting season for sea turtles in Ghana, which means teams walk the beach in shifts practically all night long. Why all the effort? Because poaching is unfortunately a massive problem in Ghana. That’s why the night patrol teams (currently four teams) are out from midnight until 3 AM, followed by the morning patrols until around 7:30 AM. The goal: keep a close eye on turtle activity and get the eggs safely to the hatchery.

At just before 5 AM, it was time for us to roll out of bed! We headed out together with our guide, Twene. The atmosphere on the beach at first dawn was absolutely magical. The deep roar of the Atlantic in our ears, the still-cool breeze on our faces, and a sky slowly turning from deep purple to a warm pastel orange as the sun rose over the horizon.

While our own patrol remained quiet, the team of Ms. Jim and Ms. Scarth made a heartbreaking discovery: fresh tracks of a sea turtle that had crawled onto the beach to lay her eggs but has never returned to the ocean. Poached. It’s one thing to read about it in theory, but seeing the harsh reality right in front of us hit us with full force. Twene mentioned that the issue is that people here have to make a living this way. 

I thought about it for a long time, and my mind just got stuck in this vicious cycle of poverty and a lack of alternatives. It makes you feel so sad and angry.

Just how close despair and hope truly are became clear right after that at the hatchery. There, we dug up a nest where the hatchlings had broken out in the middle of the night. This is an important scientific routine to determine the success rate and remove eggshell remains. And then, a little miracle happened: Deep in the sand, we bumped into a tiny straggler. A mini sea turtle that hadn't been able to make it to the surface on its own.

What an honor to guide this tiny creature to the water in the morning sun! An indescribably beautiful moment when the waves finally caught it and we sent it off into the vast Atlantic with our very best wishes! 🌊❤️

But there wasn’t much time to reflect. Despite the jet lag, burning eyes, and only four hours of sleep, the morning kept us busy. We buried data loggers in the sand to compare the temperatures at various nesting depths on the beach with those in the hatchery—crucial data to visualize the impact of climate change, among other things, and to potentially further optimize the hatching conditions inside the hatchery.

The takeaway from this first day of research:
We are tired, pretty tired, but we are ready for our next shift.
And: There is absolutely nowhere else in the world we’d rather be.