Buck Island Adventures

On my second to last day on the island I woke up at a quarter to four (yikes!) drove to Judith's Fancy to pickup my new friend Moko, and drove out to Point Udal- the easternmost point in the US- and watched the sunrise. It was absolutely beautiful, and very cool to be able to say that on that day we were the first in the whole country to see the sun.

Moko at dawn

The road back towards center island- notice buck island to the right

The marina we set out from.

Then we joined Kirsten, another National Park intern who works with the turtle program, and Clayton and Jamie, two of the park biologists, on a boat to Buck Island. From 7AM to about 4PM we roamed the island doing various turtle preservation tasks. First we worked on the rat catching project- an especially horrible sounding job as I am truly terrified of the creatures. Luckily the islands rat population has been almost completely eradicated so all that we were doing is testing what the population level is by setting up traps at night, checking them in the morning and recording the findings.

St. Croix... a pot of gold?

Buck Island dock

Beautiful reef from the scenic overlook

Monitoring the traps

We spent the rest of the day excavating hatched turtle nests. This is normally an illegal thing to do- but for the day I was wearing my scientist hat and working as a park volunteer and so it was allowed. The nests we were digging were suspected or confirmed nests that should have already hatched. We were digging to determine how many eggs hatched, how many didn't, and if the ones that didn't were fully developed or not at all. Sounds simple enough, but KIrsten, Moko and I dug and dug at a lot of different suspected nest sites and didn't find anything. We did find eggs at two sites, and the smell was horrible!

There are excursions to buck island, and although there aren't very many people who go on them (and even fewer locals) they pose some risk to the nests that litter the beach but go undetected by the inexperienced eye.

This particular nest was supposed to be a sure thing- several thorns and a hole big enough to bury myself we gave up...

Our first successful nest- AND the easiest to dig up!

Moko and Kirsten recording data

This nest was sad- one turtle laid here, and then another one dug it up and lay hers right on top. Not only does this mean the data couldn't be collected, there were a high number of undeveloped eggs, and we found two fully developed hatchlings that never opened their eyes or made it to the surface.