It's a hard knock life...

Last night I was sitting out on a beach, watching the stars, drinking coconut milk from a coconut I'd cracked earlier that day. I was hanging out with some fun kids my age and was on the watch for sea turtles. It's a hard job, this one. In the last week, I've spent six nights camping on a remote tropical beach, have hiked over crazy awesome lava rock, jumped into a natural pond formed in a crack in the lava field and have visited a beautiful set of waterfalls. And to think I'm getting paid to do this!

Well... sort of.

But ten dollars a day and a place to stay seem like excellent compensation for what looks like is going to be three months of absolutely excellent Hawaii camping time.

My first trip out was rather excellent. After orientation with my fellow newbie, we set out in our 4x4 beast of a truck with a seasoned veteran for a six night trip to the beach. Getting to our site required an impressive amount of off-roading over lava terrain, a trip that, in a car built before shocks and good suspension, ended up feeling something like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. Babadumdum babadum babadumdum babadumdumdum!

Then we arrived at our new home for the next six nights.

Tough luck, huh?

As turtle girls and boys, our job is to monitor, protect, and research the extremely endangered Hawksbill Sea Turtle. Though Hawaii is well known for its beautiful green sea turtle (which, incidentally, is also endangered, though not as badly as the hawksbill), few people know about the Hawksbill's existence. Poor Hawksbills, no love. One Hawaiian that I met was rare in that he actually knew the difference between the two, but asked us why we were bothering to save a sea turtle that didn't even taste good.

(For the record, if you ever were to find a Hawksbill, do not make it in to soup. Besides the fact that this would make you a terrible person, it would also be a really bad idea- Hawksbills mostly eat sponges and are actually unpalatable to people.)

So what do we actually do, you may ask? Nighttime is where most of our work lies; we sit out on the beach from 7 pm to 2 am every night watching for momma Hawksbills to come up and lay eggs. Because I'm here later in the season, we also have nests that are getting ready to hatch, so we babysit nests, watching for little baby turtles to emerge. Our beach had a nest that was due, so every night we sat in front of that nest. That way, if we missed the hatchlings coming out of the sand, we would still notice them when they scampered over us on their way to the sea. Oh, to be covered in scampering baby sea turtles!!

Each day we woke up at 6 am to check the beaches again (in case anything happened in the four hours we were asleep), and then went on a day hike to check other beaches with previous Hawksbill activity. For one of these hikes, we crossed epic lava fields. For the other, we got to jump into a crack in the lava rock where a cool and deep briny pool had formed. The rest of the day was our own to do with as we wanted, which tended to include a lot of napping.

Not too shabby, eh?

To top it all off, I was lucky enough to get to see a momma sea turtle on my first trip! She came up and tried to nest for 5 hours, but all the nests she dug didn't suit her fancy, so she decided to go back to the sea. On her way back, we restrained her (read: turtle wrestling) so we could check her tags and measure her. Her back flippers didn't have tags, so I even got to help tag a turtle on my first trip. In case you were wondering, restraining a turtle is not an easy task. You throw a towel over her head to calm her down, then sort of put her in a head lock, holding her powerful front flippers off the ground. It was quite a challenge even for the three of us, and this was a smaller Hawksbill! Dude, what will I do when there's only one other person besides me and a full sized turtle? I better start doing some push ups.

(If anyone can tell me how to turn this picture so that it is horizontal rather than vertical, I would be much obliged. Blogger is being difficult. The picture I uploaded definitely is not oriented like this.)

So yeah. That's my new job here. My life may be made of win.