Turtle Watch received the “Terre de Femmes”-price yesterday at the Berns Hotell Stockholm at a fancy price ceremony. The day begun with a morning flight from Helsinki to Stockholm, where a taxi was waiting for the Finnish representatives. The ceremony begun with champagne and mingling, after which the gala was opened by the CEO of Yves Rochér Nordic.  After that, last year’s winners Anna and Elin gave an update on their project. Next up was Turtle Watch and the winner of the first price, Nathalie Simonsson.

COWABUNGA!

Two weeks ago in Freezing Finland I (Pirita) was wondering what to pack for my three month mission in Thailand. At the same time I was anxious and excited about what Phuket and working for Turtle Watch would bring for us.  

We have started a campaign that aims at decreasing the use of wild animals as tourist attractions. Because we advise tourists to avoid having their picture taken with wild animals on the streets, we wanted to find an option where tourist could photograph animals with a good conscious. We were wondering whether the Phuket Zoo could be such an option, and decided to go have a look.

Turtle Watch got a great piece of news last week; we have won the second price of Terre de Femmes-contest Nordic and we will receive a price of 3000 Euros. The price seremony will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, in early February. The first price went to Swedish Nathalie Simonsson for her project “Paradise Forest” which maps the vegetation in Papua New Guinea and helps local deaf children.

The winter season has started and Turtle Watch has a lot to catch up with. We have two brand new satellite trackers that were shipped to us from the US and it currently looks like they will be placed on the backs of Michaelangelo and Ariel, our newest adoption turtle. Both turtles will be released into the Andaman Sea after New Years! That way we can get more data about how captive reared turtles behave in the wild. It is also our wish to attach trackers to naturally born turtles so we could compare the behavior of captive reared turtles with natural ones!

The autumn has arrived once again which means that we will slowly start packing up our stuff and move our head quarters to warmer latitudes! During the past season we have obtained great results from the movement patterns of turtles by tracking Urho, Hilja and Hertta and we will continue to gather more data this incoming season. This year we will be attaching at least two more satellites to new green turtles around Christmas.

There are currently four different seaturtle species in Thailand. We have encountered three of them and yesterday we had an opportunity to see the forth one, namely the biggest; the giant leatherback turtle which can grow up to 2.5 meters. There are only four nesting females left in the whole of Thailand so it would have been a very special occasion to see the turtle!