Goodbye Brisbane, hello world!

It’s me! Finally, have had the time to sit down and write this blog, apologies for taking so long, so much has been happening here in the middle of the Indian Ocean!

I have so far been in Mauritius (or Ile Maurice as they say here) for almost exactly a month! I shall give a brief list of the most memorable events to date: I have swum in the Indian ocean off a tiny tropical island, climbed and abseiled a cliff face below a lighthouse looking out towards Madagascar, observed and helped save the critically endangered and largest day gecko in the world, chased on my hands and knees through spiny bushes and over spikey rocks, the Telfair’s Skink and have bonded with the BIGGEST tortoise I have ever seen! (he really likes it when you tickle him under the chin). I have learnt how to make Creole-style rotis, have drunk the local beer, and rum, possibly a little too much of both last weekend ;), I have danced for hours to a live reggae band at the local pub, and have gone skinny dipping in the Indian Ocean at midnight! Not all is sunshine and butterflies though, as I have also become aquainted with a gastro virus courtesy of Mauritian water supplies, and become the victim of a hundred bruises and scrapes; most from incidences with tripping over the coral on the paths, and some with as yet unidentifiable causes! As well as have my hands become the chew toy of a gravid and very pissed of Telfair skink who wouldn’t come out of her hiding place as much as I attempted to pull her out!

During the week (Monday to Friday) I am living on a small island off the South-East coast of Mauritius called Ile Aux Aigrettes. This 27 Ha island is a nature reserve leased by the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (or MWaF to us) and is used as a refuge for translocated endemic endangered species, where myself and 10 or so other staff carry out projects on the island. There are 6 projects on the island; the Olive White eye, Mauritius Fody, Pink Pigeon, Seabird translocation, Rare-plant, and Reptile translocation, the last of which I of course am working on. The reptile team or (DIRT team as we are called – Durrell Initiative Reptile Translocation team)

The month started off fairly slowly, Dany (the local Mauritian guy I am working with) and I, started off doing a vegetation survey of the entire island of Ile Aux Aigrettes, and it has taken rather a lot longer than we anticipated unfortunately as it’s not the most exciting of work!

However last week, Dany and my manager Nik went to one of the Offshore Islands (Gunner’s Quoin) to do some clearing in preparation for our reptile survey stuff we will be doing there in a couple of weeks, and so I was the only DIRT team person around so I was able to work on some reptile stuff. A typical day involves waking up at 6:00am with the Fodies, making coffee, having a good breakfast, and heading out (attempting to atleast haha) at 7:00am. I start the day off by selecting a particular area of the island to work on (try to survey the entire island once a month) and searching for Telfair’s Skinks. Once I find one, I catch it (an art which I am still in the process of learning as they’re sneaky little shits!) and ‘Process’ it, which involves scanning the pit-tag that is embedded underneath the skin, taking morphological measurements of the tail, body, body condition, scar recognition and faecal analysis (not the most amazing part of the whole thing, especially when they get so scared they shit all over your equipment/hands haha). Once that is done, they are marked with their individual ID number with a permanent marker on their pelvis and released (this is so that we do not accidentally catch them again the next day, and we can see that we have already caught them recently, the marker wears off after a week or so…) So that is my morning, and I try to process as many as I can find in one area in a morning. Last week unfortunately was not very successful as the areas I was searching don’t have the best habitat and the weather was particularly hot so didn’t see much at all.

Then in the afternoons, after a lunch break, I will go out and search for Guenther’s Geckos. This is a little different as it involves spending hours on end with your neck craned searching the tree trunks trying to find a gecko the same colour as the bark itself… But with tuned-in eyes they become failry easy to spot! Unfortunately there are only 50 adult Guenther’s on the island, so unless you know the area that one particularly lives in, the chances of finding one are fairly slim! We know each gecko by sight, (well I don’t yet but Dany does) and they each have tell-tail markings such as scars and tail breaks and missing toes/legs that help us to find out who they are). Once we know who they are we take measurements about the exact position they are in including a gps point. It is these GPS points that I will be paying particular attention to whilst I am here as I am looking at the 3-dimensional home ranges that each individual Guenther occupies throughout the year, so in other words where he Guenther lives, and using fancy algorithms and GIS mapping technology I will be able to work out the sizes of home ranges on the island in comparison to their previous home of Round Island before the translocations a year ago.

It all sounds a little complicated I know but I am looking forward to getting stuck into that, and hopefully get some really interesting results out of it and maybe get something written up for publishing at some point over the next few months.

So that Is what I do on Ile Aux Aigrettes, and then when I am not doing that, the DIRT team does a lot of work on the offshore islands both of the north coast and south east coast of Mauritius (known together as the Mascarene Islands). Now this is where my job gets awesome as some of these islands are literally deserted islands in paradise! Some of them are not accessably by anything except helicopter (!!) and no one is allowed to go there without strict permission from National Parks. Except for us, we get to go and do survey work of all the little tiny night geckos, endemically found only on a tiny scrap of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean and nowhere else on earth! One of these critters is found on only half of a tiny island on the barrier reef of Mauritius, that is 2.7 hectares in size, and nowhere else in this world will you see another lizard like it! So this is why I love my job, I get to see amazing places, and save amazing animals that would be long gone without the help of MWF and Durrell who are desperately trying to save endangered species, and prevent disasters like the many extinctions that went on during the first colonization of Mauritius. The most famous of which is of course the Dodo, but there were many other species that went extinct including a giant skink a metre long, the red rail, and many many others that have become icons here in the country. Mauritius really is the icon of conservation, and has become the centre of endangered species protection ever since that fateful day of the Dodo, now a world-wide known icon of extinction.

So on the weekends we have a weekend house on the West coast of mainland Mauritius, in a town called Rivière Noire (or Black River) where we all congregate to do our washing and internet and socialize and drink rum and watch football, and play football, go rockclimbing, and sit on the beach and pretty much just have a relaxing 2 nights before another big week ahead!

So that Is what I have just done, but it is late and I need to get a good night’s sleep. I wil be back online next weekend, and then Tuesday-week I am off to one of the other offshore islands for 5 days on the North side to do survey work of little critters! Very excited, photos will come soon!! After that, 2 more island trips with single weeks inbetween, so lots of island living coming up hooray! Will try and be better at keeping this blog more up to date.

Until we talk again, I hope you are all well, sending love and hugs from Mauritius!

Melissa xox