Work

The first full week of work since the holidays, and I couldn't be happier! I love to stay busy and this week kept me going for sure.

I now help out at the St. Christopher Heritage Society, a local NGO, and am working on updating/redoing their herbarium. A herbarium is a collection of dried, pressed plants. I will be collecting and archiving species from here on the island, which in turn can be used for future reference and study. I'm pretty excited about doing it because that gives me a real good excuse to go out hiking, and all the other volunteers are more than eager to help me with that! Right now I am working on writing a proposal for funding so I can order materials.

Working with the Heritage Society will also afford me some great opportunities to get involved with other local environmental projects. On Thursday I was kind of thrown into the mix when the director for SCHS couldn't make a meeting and sent me instead to take notes. It ended up being a meeting with representatives from the various ministries, and they were discussing and assessing the effects of essentially planning an ecotourism scheme up in our Central Forest Reserve. I am very interested in the proposal of this project and am hoping to tag along to some of the other meetings. The area of environmental policy and management is something I am very interested in, and I would love to see the planning and politics that go into undertaking huge tasks like these. Especially since here in St. Kitts, ecotourism is essentially non-existent. This is another reason why I believe this herbarium will be useful. I plan on collecting plants in the areas of existing trails, which are also the ones they want to build from, so it will be interesting to see how the flora and fauna of the area will change.

I have also been volunteering with the St. Kitts Sea Turtle monitoring Network. On Tuesday I had the opportunity to go out with the group to White House Beach and help with in-water tagging. A Kittitian named Darren Browne, came in from Barbados where he is doing genetic research on Hawksbill turtles in the Eastern Caribbean. What we did was just snorkel in the bay and alert Darren when we saw a turtle. He would come over and catch it then take it back on shore to get tissue samples and tag it. On Tuesday we caught 2 Hawksbills and 1 Green turtle. The Greens are really pretty and that is what is pictured. I also got to see a few sting rays buried in the sand, an eagle ray swim past me, and a giant puffer fish. It was an amazing day and can't wait untill they do it again!!! The nesting season starts in March and will more than likely get to see some huge Leatherbacks then.


All these things are keeping me busy, but am hoping that will ultimately help me in creating some sort of environmental program for the youth. I really want to get them involved with projects like the sea turtle program and into the environmental issues here on the island, but I am not quite sure where to start. For now I am thinking of just creating activities with the youth members of the Heritage Society. Then maybe I can branch off from there. The main problem will be trying to make it sustainable for after I leave...