Our Latest News- August 31, 2026
Argostoli Field Station
Saying goodbye to our last volunteer group has been a big moment for us these past two weeks. They were such a brilliant team, and we’re really grateful for everything they brought to the project: early mornings, late nights, and so much care for the turtles. We are also super excited to welcome our new groups in the coming weeks, as we can’t wait to see what they bring to the project!
Now that we’re fully into hatching season, things have been busy in all the best ways! We had what we think was our final nest of the year, which we safely relocated to a protected hatchery site! Since then, our focus has been primarily on hatchlings, surveys and harbour patrols, and there’s been plenty to keep us moving!
We’ve had lots of successful inventories and have loved the opportunity to educate the public on the work that we do. To the public, we have been overwhelmed by the incredible attendance, support and feedback. We greatly appreciate your time, patience and understanding. Alongside these inventories, we’ve helped many hatchlings to sea during our hatchlingrescue shifts and morning surveys. Watching them make their way down the sand never loses its magic, and the team has been fantastic at giving each one the best possible start.
As our morning work continues and the temperature begins to cool, we’ve jumped back into evening shifts, including beach cleans, beach profiling, and public-awareness sessions. Chatting with visitors, answering questions, and helping people learn how to protect the turtles is always a highlight for the team. These shifts also help us plan for future relocations and hatchery sites, whilst also supporting our work to reduce litter and marine pollution.
We’re excited to keep going as we move through the comingweeks of the season, and to finish strong together.
Skala Field Station
Over the past two weeks, our volunteers have encountered an exciting range of marine life during snorkel surveys and while exploring the coast in their free time. Highlights include a common octopus, two loggerhead turtles, a ray, and a sea snail!
Alongside this, our volunteers conducted light pollution surveys across Mounda, Gialou, and Katelios beaches,providing data on unwanted light spilling on to to work with them over the next two weeks!nesting beaches.
We have also been keeping busy in the evenings. Volunteers organised an extra beach clean on a section of Mounda Beach that falls outside our usual survey area. The volunteers worked very hard to recover debris from across the area, including a large pile of plastic water bottles trapped within the dunes!
Svoronata Field Station
As we welcome our next Svoronata group of the season, we are looking back on the last two weeks, which have absolutely flown by! We have had lots of wholesome moments alongside a significant number of hours put in across all our shifts, including beach cleans, sand dune surveys, beach profiles, snorkel surveys, and bird surveys. This included surveying some newer areas of sand dunes, providing lots of interesting data!
Our recent group were enthusiastic snorkel surveyors and spotted several resident wildlife species, including flatfish, stingrays, and a loggerhead turtle. They covered 10 km of seafloor and recorded depths of up to 11.2 m over a total of 213 readings.
During our recent bird surveys, we have visited several locations around Kefalonia, including Lavadi and the lighthouse, to observe and identify different bird species. We observed several species, such as Little Egrets and Alpine Swifts, as well as other common birds found on the island, including Yellow-legged Gulls, Sardinian Warblers, and House Sparrows.
We would like to thank this group for all their hard work and enthusiasm. It has been a joy to work alongside them over the last two to four weeks, and we hope to see them again!
Our next group of the season has just arrived and jumped right in, already completing sand dune surveys, beach cleans, and beach profile shifts. They are collecting some very important data as we near the end of the season. We can’t wait to work with them over the next two weeks!
Education Program and Lourdas Field Station
We are continuing to have a very successful hatching season in the Lourdas survey area. We now have 32 nests remaining and have therefore completed almost half of our total 63 nests this season! Recently, our team have located and protected two more FBH (found by hatching) nests on Lourdas and Kanali, relocating them swiftly to give them the best chance of hatching success. We have conducted lots of public inventories this season, and have had some lovely audiences who have been kind, curious and supportive of our conservation efforts. Thank you for your enthusiasm!
We have had some more wonderful volunteer groups over the last few weeks, who have really enjoyed getting involved in our work. Sightings of our most famous Argostoli turtle, Barb, have resulted in much excitement from our family groups, who love to share their knowledge with tourists on the harbour. Volunteers have been helping us gather valuable data by recording interactions between turtles on the harbour, and managed to capture a fantastic video of two turtles sparring.
On our snorkel surveys, our groups are continuing to observe the wide variety of wildlife in our waters, including one group who were lucky enough to encounter a common octopus. The support of our volunteers on snorkel surveys allows us to create detailed maps of the seagrass meadows around Kefalonia, which helps us to understand how these incredible carbon sinks are changing over the years as a result of climate change and other human factors.
As our season here on the Education Program slowly progresses toward the end, we look forward to welcoming our final groups over the coming weeks and thank all those who have joined us this summer!
Lixouri Field Station
Here in Lixouri, things are beginning to slow down, with hatching activity slowly starting to decrease. With all nesting emergences now finished, our focus has shifted to monitoring the remaining nests and making sure the final hatchlings of the season have the safest possible journey to the sea.
Although hatching has slowed, our volunteers are still getting the chance to witness hatchlings make their way down to sea. Each successful hatch is just as exciting as the last, and we have been successful in helping over 900 hatchlings from inventories alone.
Our beach clean and profile shifts are now in full effect, keeping our volunteers busy as we turn attention towards the condition of the beaches. These shifts are an important part of our work, helping to keep nesting beaches clean and monitoring changes to the beach profile throughout the season.
Although things are certainly quieter than they were a few weeks ago, there is still plenty happening on the beaches! We are looking forward to seeing the remaining nests hatch. As we move closer to the end of the season, we are excited to see what the coming weeks will bring.
