Our Latest News- August 13, 2025

Skala Field Station

We have just said a teary goodbye to a wonderful group of volunteers here in Skala, with everyone leaving after making new lifelong friends and plans to meet up in the future. Each volunteer participated in their shifts with enthusiasm and passion, surveying 245 quadrats of sand dunes, as well as taking 9176 photos during their snorkel surveys. They also worked hard to keep our beaches clean, collecting over 600 pieces of rubbish during their marine debris surveys. Despite the late nights, volunteers thoroughly enjoyed the light pollution shifts, taking 330 readings and helping us understand how anthropogenic light affects our local turtles and wildlife. This group took full advantage of the evening activities, getting stuck into souvlaki, card games, quizzes, beach olympics and much more. Thank you for all the hard work everyone!

Our new group has arrived and is excited to start their conservation work. They are already demonstrating this through some very successful first shifts. Beach shift demonstrations were followed by an evening swim and some souvlaki—not a bad way to start their time here in Skala! We can’t wait to see the wonderful work this group will do!

Svoronata Field Station

Our interns developed a more efficient method for our beach clean surveys to improve reliability and validity! We were able to keep our methods, but fine-tune them into the best possible version. Our team also covered nearly 25 km during our snorkel surveys over the past two weeks, creating a big step forward in getting a clear picture of the seafloor and the impacts the local seagrass is facing.

Thanks to the work of the volunteers, we were able to continue exploring the many bird species of the island of Kefalonia. Our team spotted a Kingfisher, something that we don’t see very often. This was very exciting for the new volunteers, as this was the first time we had seen this bird species thus far in the season. The team also had the pleasure of witnessing baby turtles hatching during our Beach Demos and really drawing on the importance of the work that we are doing here. It was enough to put a smile on both the volunteers and the staff members’ faces.

Lixouri Field Station

The hatching season is well and truly underway in Lixouri, with over 1,000 hatchlings helped to sea by our hard-working volunteers over the last few weeks. Hatchling rescue is a new favourite shift amongst volunteers; this night shift involves checking on known hatching nests and helping emerging hatchlings to sea. Light pollution is a major issue for the hatchlings during the night as it distracts them from their initial journey from nest to sea; therefore, the volunteers are boosting their chance at survival.

Despite the nesting season coming to a close, we have had several recently laid nests on Megas Lakkos! This welcome surprise has given the volunteers the opportunity to learn about both adult and hatchling tracks and behaviours. One turtle in particular, named Sophie, has been attempting to nest on several beaches. The team can easily recognise her unusual tracks due to a missing rear flipper.

Recent storms have kept the team on their toes; high tides and strong winds have meant that multiple nests have had to be relocated to safer areas and nest protection has been corrected after damage. Inventories are another popular activity for both volunteers and tourists to watch, and our volunteers have been doing a wonderful job at explaining the purpose of such a task and protecting hatchlings to curious onlookers.

The team are looking forward to the rest of the season, with more than 30 nests now completed and many more to go!

Argostoli Field Station

It has been a busy few weeks here at the Argostoli field station, with most evenings packed with inventories! Out of our 117 nests, we have had hatchlings from 34 of these so far! Our volunteers have been loving getting involved with inventories, and have helped us finish 13 of these nests, bringing our current total to 104 just in the Argostoli area. All our survey areas are now hatching, which is very exciting, bringing us into the midst of hatching season. We are still seeing some nesting attempts on morning survey shifts, as the nesting season gradually tapers off.

Recently, we had a day packed full of emergencies. After some of the team went down to do some checks on some of our nests, they found the waves had come up very high, and lots of our nests in the Avithos area were likely to be inundated. This prompted the whole team, including those from different field stations, to work together to perform emergency inventories on our hatching nests and relocate any that were still incubating. During this extremely busy time, the team moved over 1000 eggs and helped lots of hatchlings get safely to sea! Since that day, we have had good hatchling success rates from lots of these nests, showing how our hard work has really paid off!

Education Program

Hatching season has officially landed in the Lourdas area! Excitement is mounting as our first nests are now yielding hatchlings, with some needing more of a helping hand than others due to deep holes left on our beaches. This was the case when our volunteers found a hatchling that had emerged overnight but became stranded on its way to sea. Luckily, we were able to help the hatchling out and it made its way swiftly into the waves. These holes can be difficult obstacles for turtle hatchlings, so please remember to fill in any holes and knock over your sandcastles at the end of the day!

The final weeks of nesting season have been tumultuous, with strong winds resulting in high waves across the Lourdas beaches. As a result, some of our nests became inundated with seawater and had to be emergency relocated by our team to higher, drier areas. Our team were also in the middle of a relocation when the wildfire took off on on the 8th of August, luckily the eggs were safe!

We are still busy finding our last few nests and adult tracks as nesting season draws to a close after an eventful year!