During nesting season (late May – early August) a team of volunteers patrols the nesting beach every night (22:30-05:30) looking for turtle tracks. When a team finds a nesting female, data about the turtle (health, size, tag number) is collected.
The eggs hatch after a period of about 55 days (August – September). During hatchling season the beach is not patrolled at night so that hatchlings can get to the water with as little disturbance as possible. Volunteers are on the beach early in the morning and also during the day. Volunteers keep the beach clean, remove obstacles that may prevent the hatchlings from reaching the water safely, and collect data on nests and hatchlings also with excavations.
In the last few years we have started surveying other turtle nesting beaches of Kefalonia. The number of nests found on these beaches in previous seasons show that night watches here are probably not worth the effort. However, to keep track of the fluctuations in these still relevant nesting sites, we are discussing the possibility of morning surveys.
The main constraint is transport to the beaches. Roads are in bad conditions or don’t exist at all, and some beaches are distant. Our options are a combination of these means of transport:
- bus
- bicycles
- hitch hiking
- walking
- kayak
Some of these beaches (like Koroni) are very popular with some volunteers who like it 
‘wilder’, because of the opportunity to spend some time on a remote beautiful beach with few or no people at all. They are better suited for the fittest volunteers, although anyone could get there (and everyone usually does). They are not for people who need an ice cream while they are sunbathing, despite the fact that in Koroni they recently built a small kiosk for this purpose.
Volunteers take part in another vital action: environmental education. Tourists and locals are informed on how to reduce or avoid actions that could harm turtles (even the most harmless-looking, like building a sandcastle) through leaflets, presentations, permanent exhibitions in our Environmental Centre. During the day volunteers staff the Environmental Centre and the info desks in the village of Katelios and on Mounda beach.
Volunteers are involved in duties related to community life, like cooking, cleaning, small maintenance works. Volunteers now stay in shared, rented rooms. Rooms and common spaces must be kept absolutely tidy and clean by the volunteers.
Other activities include, but are not limited to, cleaning Katelios beach, taking part in turtle rescues/burials when we get reports of injured or dead turtles, organizing the Environmental Festival in August.
We must stress that our Turtle Project does NOT focus purely on research. We focus on the conservation of the small existing population of turtles. We try to keep the handling of and disturbance to the animals and their habitat to a minimum. Collecting data on nesting and population patterns is very important, but it is not the only nor the main activity of volunteers. Awareness raising, mostly directed towards tourists, is another key element of our work, and volunteers will spend at least 50% of their time involved in awareness raising activities.
