The Working Week

I'm becoming dangerously used to a snooze in the middle of the day! We work 8-12am and then 2-5pm which leaves 2 blissful hours in the middle of the day for lunch and a siesta; perfect. The working week is Monday to Saturday with Sundays off, although, if we feel we've had a productive week, we give ourselves Saturday afternoon off as well!

The work varies and we're pretty much left to manage and organise ourselves with just high level objectives shared at the beginning, during my induction.

The work is split in to:

Maintenance - making sure existing paths and buildings are holding up. This is the team painting the dining hut and also fixing the roof of my house. Everything rots or is eaten so quickly here.

Conservation (of the forest) - which includes collecting seedlings nurturing them and planting areas that need regeneration. There are also several introduced Filao trees (Casuarina) that need to be removed.

Conservation (of the mangroves) - to the west, the Reserve is bordered by 2km of river and there is ongoing work to regenerate the banks by planting mangroves and we have been continuing that with survey work, report writing, signage and education.

Wildlife - continuing habituation of the lemurs at Sainte Luce which is a great excuse to walk in the forest early in the morning and at night to cover the diurnal and nocturnal species. There's a fairly resident group of Red Collared Brown lemurs, the only diurnal species, who we get to stalk quite often! I've noticed a marked reduction in the level of noise when we see them now which, in my lay person's view, means they're becoming more comfortable with us..... although it does make them harder to spot!

We regularly see Southern Woolly lemurs and Fat Tailed Dwarf lemurs on the night walks and occasionally we see these cute Gray Mouse lemurs.

We're also adding to the list of species seen at the Reserve and have managed to add 3 bird species with photographs. We saw this lovely Pitta-like Ground-roller roosting during a night walk.

This black crowned night heron was one of three we saw from the canoe one morning. Even our local guru and canoe guide had never seen them before so it was great to capture them on camera.

While walking the forest one day we found a giraffe necked weevil and they're not supposed to be here so that was a surprise and something for the Reserve to publish to the wider community.

In February I was up at 5am three mornings a week to walk the beach at dawn looking for any sea turtle egg laying signs. We never did come across any but we were rewarded with some stunning sun rises.

Projects - things that we can think of that would be useful. We've had great fun designing a board game with flash cards to help the staff with their English and us with our Malagasy. Also we've built an extension to the tree nursery and this is us passing and tying in the roof.

Education - we're putting together a lesson on mangrove conservation for a couple of the schools nearby, well a half hour canoe trip and then a 1km and 4km walk!