Pictures!

It looks like it's going to be pretty hard to post a lot of pictures on the blog (although I will admit I finally figured out how to do it just before I started typing this post), so I made an account on photobucket.com and posted a bunch of them. I think you should be able to look at them without creating an account. Just search for Rico221 and let me know if you have any problems.

This week we've been going turtle capturing every day, which means going out snorkeling over some of the most beautiful reefs I've seen and snatching sleeping turtles from under the rocks. I caught a little tiny hawksbill yesterday (just over a foot across his shell), which was awesome because they're hard to find (they don't eat fish, so we can't bait them in) and it was the only one we got all day. Equilibrio Azul is the first organization in the world to identify a hawksbill aggregation area (somewhere where a lot of them hang out in one place), which was so unexpected that people didn't believe them when they first announced it.

In other news, a new volunteer arrived unexpectedly a couple days ago. His name is Peter and he's from Syracuse, New York. He looks and acts so much like Jamie Muldoon it's almost scary. Since the staff has a long weekend starting today (they say since they worked on the island all last weekend they deserve one), Peter and Ailis and I are asking Gabi if we can go to the island tomorrow and hang out for a couple of days while we show Pete how the turtle and albatross patrols work. I haven't checked my email yet this morning to see her answer, but we're crossing our fingers.

Other than that, I've been working on my hatchery research (when the power's on), chatting with a long-winded restaurant owner named Ulbio over lunch, taking long walks on the beach, and reading whatever books in English I can find around the house (I actually just finished a really good one about artists illustrating a secret book for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire). If you see this in the first half-hour or hour after I post it the pictures might not all be up, but they look like they'll at least finish without incident.