As you know May and June of this sea turtle season have been a disaster, but in July numbers of nesting females actually picked up quite nicely. And today the Secretaria de Ecologia, which is responsible for the Sea Turtle Protection Program here in Cancun, published some interim results that I would like to share with you and compare to ours:

• As of end of July 2016 in total 534 nests are protected along Cancun’s beaches – from these we collected and guard 111 nests (minus 1 that already hatched) in our protected nesting area; that’s over 20% of the total

Everybody following us here or on Facebook knows that this year’s nesting season in Cancun is a catastrophe. So far we have a decrease in nesting females of nearly 90%. But even in bad times sometimes an unexpected silver lining brightens the mood. And exactly this happened last night when we observed the birth of our first baby turtles of the season. While busy attending a nesting turtle on the beach we were surprised by the newborns escaping the nest and moving about in our protection corral. The nest was supposed to hatch around the 18th of July... In the end we could release 63 little Loggerhead hatchlings from our nest no.1. This was once again such an amazing and rewarding experience.

This year’s sea turtle season is so different from the one last year. The arrival of the first nesting marine turtle in mid-May left us so excited that we couldn’t wait to get started. But then for weeks no more turtles. Night after night we were patrolling the beach waiting for the mother turtles to finally come to nest; and were disappointed each time.

At least until last week. Finally, there was some movement on the beach and soon afterwards the first Green Sea Turtle of this year (the species that provides over 95% of all sea turtle nests here in Cancun) laid their eggs. By now we don’t have the 100 nests in our corral like last year, but we are very happy to finally see Sea Turtles swimming in the ocean nearby and a few coming ashore looking for suitable nesting sites.

Today in the early morning (around 4.00 am) the first sea turtle of this season came ashore on "our" beach and nested. The Loggerhead Sea Turtle measured 90 x 82 cm and laid 96 eggs. Even though we were completely taken by surprise and haven't build our protected nesting area yet, we will of course take care of the nest and will hopefully have little Loggerhead babies in only 2 months.

While the 2015 Sea Turtle nesting season in Cancun already officially ended at the beginning of December, our last nest only hatched two days ago – another 51 sea turtle babies made it safely to the sea.

So it’s time for a résumé: