Back from the Island (with more pictures!)

I'm back and enjoying the weekend after another 8 days without a shower. The island was super fun this time - there was another group of biologists there with Angelo and Sandra and I, and they were great people. Diana and Felipe are from Columbia (their accents are super hard to understand) and Jacobo is from Italy. They were putting GPS tags on the Nazca Boobies to track their flights, and they got some interesting results. Nazcas are the biggest of the boobies on Isla de la Plata, and they fly 60-100 miles out to sea every day to fish. The depth gauges on the tags also showed that they can dive down 150 feet underwater! Most of the time they stay near the surface though. The weirdest thing, though, was that one of the birds flew over 50 miles in a perfectly straight line going due south one day. When we zoomed in close to its path (the GPS takes a new point every second, so you get really good resolution) we saw that it would make little sideways deviations of about 200 meters, but always return to its original line, and when you zoom out it looks like someone drew it with a ruler. All of this is without being able to see land at any point on the journey. Pretty amazing.

Every day after we'd finished our census and they'd recollected their tags in the afternoon, we went back to the house and Jacobo oversaw dinner preparations. We had pasta with fresh homemade tomato sauce, ceviche made with fish from the pescadores down the beach, patacones (fried sweet plantain cakes), and big fresh potato salads. We ate better than we do here in town, come to think of it. It was such a fun experience to be able to talk to people from all over the world working on different projects, everyone speaking sort of Spanglitalian and working on their second (and third) languages. Felipe lives in North Carolina right now, and Diana has studied both English and Italian in school, and Jacobo can also speak both Spanish and English very well. It definitely made me want to keep studying biology and to pick up another language on the way.

To top it all off, on Friday, Angelo and I's last night, a turtle came up to lay a nest! It was the first one on the island in exactly a month, and it was unmarked, so we had to stay with it from 2 in the morning till 5 while it dug for an hour, laid eggs for an hour, and covered them for another. We also had to tag it and take a DNA sample, measure it, count the eggs, and mark the nest when it was done - all by ourselves because everyone else had left already. I was super tired and a little grumpy with the turtle at the time, but I'm glad we got to mark a nest before we left.

Diana sent me some really good pictures, which I've already put up on photobucket, and I'll see if I can get some that Angelo took of the turtle, too. Hasta luego!