The Great Allure of Sea Grass

I survived my first day in Belize! I got to sleep in this morning (till 7 am – crazy!) since I didn’t learn anything yesterday. After breakfast, I went with another manatee volunteer and learned how to clean sea grass and put it into a pvc pipe feeder for the smaller manatee, Duke. Duke isn’t used to being handled by people so he receives his the sea grass feeder and is tube fed through a nasogastric tube. I then had some time to read and relax until lunch since a thunderstorm rolled in and we couldn’t go out into the lagoon. It cleared up around 2 so we took the boat out and had Twiggy, the older, larger manatee follow us. Twiggy has started the process of her soft release. She spends most of her time right outside Wildtracks property, but on a few days a week she follows the boat further out into the lagoon. She will continue to spend more time away from Wildtracks and eventually, hopefully be released. We found a mangrove island and sat around there for about an hour while she snacked on some sea grass, but never wandered more than about twenty feet away. We started to leave, but decided to construct a make shift sail from a tarp, an oar and a pushing stick so we wouldn’t have to paddle. It came together pretty well, but by the time we had it finished, Twiggy decided that she wasn’t ready to go. We had to sit around the island for another hour and a half coaxing her to follow us instead of gorging on sea grass. After finally relenting and deciding she was ready we tested out our sail. It actually worked pretty well and we had a stop a few times to allow Twiggy to catch up with us! We put her back in the enclosure and fed her a bottle. Tomorrow I get the morning feed with the manatees, which means I get to be up bright and early!