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!
No comments:
Post a Comment