Special Visitors

In just a weeks time we will have been working on Aride for a year and we will soon start to see things going full circle. Like the change of the monsoons, one bringing visitors the other breeding birds, or the turtle season - full of highs and lows, much like the time of flowering Pisonia and its deadly sticky seeds.





Well November is still a new month for us and it has been the time for migrants bringing plenty of new visitors of the feathered variety to the island. Although Aride has many thousands of pairs of birds on its 73ha, it does fall short on variety, so the arrival of some new species has been quite a highlight. For me they have been what I would call quality birds too, like the Crab Plover.

A really bizarre looking species with a bill like a tomahawk and legs, well it had a stride almost the length of one of my feet, its legs are extremely long! Very Avocet like in movement, but purpose built to catch crabs, a long stride and a bill like a chisel. I would watch them stab a ghost crab and then like a young boy would do with a spider, pull its legs off one by one, then run around with the body in its beak. They seldom flew anywhere, but made full use of their long legs and ran to where they needed to go.

Then there were the sanderlings, although common in the UK, here they have absolutely no fear of humans at all and we have been able to walk within a couple of foot away. They scurry around our feet as we haul the boat up the beach and run up to us as we sit and wait for turtles to do their thing. Just the other evening we were waiting for a turtle and a volunteer was eating his tea on the beach, he spilt some veggie curry on the sand, then to our amazement it was eaten by a sanderling as it scurried past.

There have been the little brown jobs as well, like the lesser and greater sand plovers, which in summer plumage look stunning, but by the time they get to Aride they are both a rather dull brown colour. Still not to be knocked they are a welcome addition to the group of turnstones that frequent the beach daily.

However the stars of the show so far have to be the blue-cheeked bee eaters, they arrived last week and are still here. They are magical and seem very fitting for a tropical island, with their bright colours and wonderful call. We have had up to 18 along the beach crest, and currently there is at least a group of 8, a mix of adults and juveniles. Some of the adults have still got their blue-cheeks, together with a yellow chin patch and rusty throat.

The beach crest is their favoured haunt, where they seem very successful at hawking insects; they are particularly active at dawn and dusk and tend to go quiet in the heat of the day – like most of us!

Unfortunately none of these birds are immune to Pisonia and both the sanderlings and bee eaters have been a victim of it, the sanderling managed to deal with it, but the bee eater needed a helping hand – for which we obliged.

That’s one thing about life on a remote island you never quite know what will turn up next and that can happen with both birds and people!!

One of the advantages of having composting loos.

Well before last night other than the environmental reasons, I didn’t think there were that many other advantages to having composting toilets, but now...

For composting loos to work effectively it is best not to wee in them, and it was only because of this that we were both going for a wee on the beach late last night. Melv lead the way, but then came rushing back;
‘There’s something big in the bushes on the beach crest, thrashing round’ he said excitedly.
He grabbed the torch and took a quick –oh my word it was a green turtle – right next to our house, she was digging a nest chamber to lay her eggs right next to where we sit on the beach crest.

Hawksbill turtles frequently use Aride’s beach to lay their eggs at this time of year, with over 60 emergences last year. But green turtles are extremely rare and Aride didn’t have any emergences last year and only 3 the year before. Greens are much bigger than hawksbills, with an average track size of 110cm compared to a hawksbills’ at 75cm. So you can imagine the excitement having one right on the doorstep, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would see a green turtle, especially as they only come out at night, compared to hawksbills which will emerge to nest at any time of day.

We walked round to reach the beach so we could get behind her and not cause any disturbance that is the golden rule, until a turtle has laid stay out of her sight, or they may desert. She was now covering up, busy camouflaging her nest site by moving large amounts of sand and vegetation, hawksbills also do this to disguise where their eggs are, but greens disturb so much ground it looks like a building site.

We sat in the darkness and listened, the noise of the surf made it quite difficult to pick up the noise at times. I strained my eyes to try and see what she was going, we could see sand being flicked up every so often but it was almost impossible to see the turtle herself. I so wanted to put the torch on just to get a glimpse, but I had to wait. It was just amazing to think that there was green turtle, the size of a dinner table, less than 5m away from where I was sitting and yet I couldn’t see her, I had to wait.

Then there was an almighty crash followed by breaking branches and she emerged out of the large sandcastle that she had built, it was now safe to shine the torch just to the side of her for a minute to catch a glimpse of what she was doing – yep she was on her way down to the sea, the nest complete.

The first snatch of what she looked like was amazing, more rounded in shape like a tortoise than the flat appearance of a hawksbill and massive; her front flippers were the power, as she dug them into the sand to drag her body behind.

As her name suggests her shell had a green tinge, Melv kept the light behind her as she made her way down the beach slowly, I put my hand on her shell, quite taken a back at the size of this animal trudging along in front of me. The tide was out and so the beach was long and there was time to take a few photographs, but I was conscious of the bright flash in her eyes.

She was leaving an uneven track behind, with a large indent made for every ‘step’ taken, a look at her rear flippers revealed that one was damaged, with no soft flipper left, just a stump, this explained the unevenness of a track we had seen early in the week – so we knew that this turtle had been up the beach at least before, this was quite common these turtles can lay 3 to 4 nests on the same beach.

Her head protruding out of the large shell and in between the two large front power house flippers, looked small, she lacked the ‘bill’ of the hawksbill, with a rounder face and a deep dark eye. What a privilege to able to stand this close to such an animal. Our time with her was soon to end as she edged closer to the water. She stopped at the water’s edge for a short while to take a rest and let the water lap up against her head and flippers, washing the sand off. You could almost sense the relief and achievement in her as she had successfully managed the huge upheaval of laying her eggs, in a place where her movement was so awkward.

As she entered the surf he movement was transformed and she became graceful once again as the large front flippers took her effortlessly out into the deeper water, soon the round dark lump of her back disappeared. I stood in the dark staring at the surf for a while is disbelief and then glanced at the beautiful clear skies, full of stars twinkling at me - what a magical moment that had been.

Back into the Swing of things

Well it will soon be 3 weeks since we have been back on Aride and I am still yet to unpack all the goodies we brought back with us. Mind you in most cases, (apart from the chocolate), things are far better left inside the hard-backed suitcases – safely away from all the wildlife that we share the house with.

We were both looking forward to getting back to the island and when we stepped on to the beach after our month away I realised that I had forgotten how beautiful it was. The light was the first thing that struck me; it was so clear and bright, as if everything was lit up with an electric light, it looked amazing, followed then once more by the abundance of wildlife.

It hasn’t taken us long to get back into the swing of things, and the weeks once again are starting to fly by. We are entering into the busy time of year now, as the seas calm and the North West monsoon begins. The visitor numbers are increasing each week, as our regular clients return and we already have cruise ships booked in for the Christmas period.

In addition to the daily tasks, Melv has been busy building a new composting loo, gaining the materials needed by recycling one of the verandas off an empty rangers’ house. It took sometime to source a new toilet seat though, with only one shop selling such an item on the whole of Praslin. But it was worth the wait and is now pure luxury.

I have been catching up on going into schools, we have finished the Aride corner at Grand Anse and I have been working on a mural at Baie Ste Anne. One of our volunteers came in with me to talk about adaptation and we used his musical talent to good end, as a song on the ukulele will make birds and adaptation a subject the children won’t forget for some time.

The wildlife is still out of this world, whilst a lot of the breeding birds have flown, we still have lesser noddy chicks just about ready to fledge and the residents, such as the white tailed tropics seem to be rearing young successfully. Visitors to the island have included a crab plover, which was a new bird for me – with such an amazing beak and legs like a stilt. Things have gone full circle and the turtles start to come up the beach once more. We have been lucky to have at least 2 of the very rare green turtles in the last few weeks, followed by the start of the hawksbills. Even though we are desperately short of water, the Wrights gardinier has been flowering, it is hard to believe that Aride is the only place in the world where this tree grows naturally, the smell from the flowers is exquisite.

Of course we have been fishing, and fresh fish has been on the menu most nights of the week, on several occasions we have tried to pull sharks into the shallows with the remains, which has provided evening entertainment for the whole island.

I still have to pinch myself most days just to check that I really am living in this amazing place, where the blue sea is so blue it hurts your eyes and the sand is so hot it burns your feet. There is always something new to see, from humpback whales to the thousands of roosting frigate birds, but it is not without its challenges, and who knows what the next 12 months will bring...