Friday 18 June 2010

Going green



Going Green….

Everyone is talking about going green! Saving the planet, saving endangered species and living greener healthier more sustainable lives. I recently completed my open water dive qualification in Thailand (http://www.godiveblog.com/2010/05/congratulations-for-new-diver-nicole.html) and was incredibly lucky to see a wild Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) turtle on my very first open water dive! I was so inspired by the beautiful creature I decided to start a fundraising project called Tag a Turtle. Together with Blue Reef Aquarium (http://www.bluereefaquarium.co.uk/), The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) (http://www.mcsuk.org/ ), Dr Brendan Godley from Exeter University (http://www.exeter.ac.uk/ )and Atlantic Diver (http://www.atlanticdiver.co.uk/ ) in Newquay myself and fellow BSc graduate and friend Nicola Morris are aiming to raise £3000 to purchase a satellite tag to tag the next injured turtle that is rehabilitated by Blue Reef in order to track its progress once it has been released. This post-release monitoring has not been done by Blue Reef Aquarium before and they are receiving more and more washed up and injured turtles each year. The rehabilitated turtle will be flown out to Gran Canaria for acclimatitazion before being tagged and released off the Canary Islands. Check out www.seaturtle.org/tracking to see other projects that have tracked juvenile loggerhead turtles released from the Canary Islands. One of the most exciting fundraising adventures in store is a sponsored cage shark dive off the Cornish coast in September this year, more details on how to sponsor and get involved will be here soon! Check out these amazing photos taken by our Thai friend It-ngam Nareekarn of a Hawksbill Turtle in the Andaman Sea. Enjoy!
Regards Nic

Sunday 13 June 2010

Hi everyone,

Welcome to my Blog!

For those of you that know me you’ll know that I’m impossibly passionate about wildlife! Most little girls dream of becoming ballet dancers, movie stars or one day owning their very own fairytale castle.

I dreamt of being outside, living in a small wooden hut somewhere in the wildest parts of the world! I dreamt of being a Zoologist!

Of course at that time I didn’t know what a zoologist was, did or if they even existed, all I knew was that I craved the outdoors and I wanted to work and live with wildlife!

Growing up in the suburbs of post apartheid South Africa I happily spent many hours consumed by Jane Goodall’s books of her time spent with Chimpanzees.

Encouraged by my father who constantly surprised us with weird and wonderful animals he’d found stranded on highways my fascination with the natural world grew and deepened. My mother had an impossible task of keeping our small household zoo of chameleons, ducklings, day old chickens, snakes, spiders and an array of other creepy crawly escapees in confinement and out of the living and bedrooms in our house!

I currently live in the beautiful county of Cornwall in the UK and have just completed my BSc (Hons) degree in Applied Zoology and am starting to make my childhood dreams happen.

I often get asked what a zoologist does, so here I am aiming to keep a weekly diary of what I’ve been getting up to and what I’ve been doing along the way. Enjoy!