Preliminary results turtle nesting season 2009

[manu]

It's been an unusually long season.

We had the first nest on Mounda beach on June 2nd. Then mother turtles kept coming into August, even after hatchling turtles had started to emerge.
The first nest hatched on August 7th, but we had adult turtles trying to nest until the end of August.

So we kept monitoring the beaches all through October, even after all the volunteers had left.

Such a stretched season, which I have never seen before in my few years in Katelios, hasn't been easy to follow. September and especially October have been very rainy, so we missed a lot of late hatching and possibly some nests altogether.

Nest numbers have been average. On Mounda we counted about 25 nests and approximately the same amount of aborted attempts.
Koroni and surrounding beaches have seen a lot of turtles but not many nests. We counted less than 10 nests on these beaches, and more than 30 unsuccessful attempts. I am going on memory, I didn't bring all the data with me when we left Kefalonia after the end of the season a couple of weeks ago.

I will post the report when it's ready, I am going back in a few weeks and will work on it.