Tomás Correia, European Solidarity Corps volunteer

Being a wildlife lover, I was involved in a study on tortoises during my volunteer programme with the SPBT. Why tortoises? You can't imagine my surprise when I found the first tortoise in Dadia, right in the garden of our house! In my home country of Portugal, we don't have tortoises, but here in Greece you see them everywhere! That's why I didn't complain at all when in the summer I came home after a whole day of looking for tortoises with sun-burnt arms.

My excursions began with the crowing of the rooster and ended at dusk. A whole day in grasslands, forests or crop fields looking for tortoises for as long as my eye could see or my ear could hear. The senses had to be on alert all the time. And once I spotted a tortoise, I photographed it several times and measured it. I was ecstatic! But one morning I found something unnatural in a grassland. A baby tortoise was trapped in an opening in the barbed wire of a fence and it had dried out from the sun. I pulled it out dead from the hole. Unfortunately the fencing was very old and deteriorated, the barbed wire was completely rusted and had fallen to the ground over the years and was partially covered by soil and vegetation. A perfect trap for baby tortoises coming out of their nests that I had found in this place. In the afternoon I found another trapped baby tortoise in the exact same place as the first one, but luckily it was alive and I released it. Then I thought that other baby tortoises might get trapped in the future.

Discussing the matter with the SPBT team we decided that the fallen wire had to be removed to prevent it from being a trap for other tortoises. After notifying the Forest Service and the property ranger of the abandoned fence, we gathered together a fence-trap removal team of volunteers and went to the site with gloves and pliers. We were ready to save the baby tortoises! Throughout the morning, we spotted other parts of the fence with fallen, rusted and half buried, barbed wire. We collected everything that had fallen and took it to a safe place to be recycled. Although while picking up the pieces of barbed wire we found more dead baby tortoises, we now knew that these places would stop being a trap for other baby tortoises. 

Since my stay in Greece, I will never forget how lucky I was to study such small creatures. But not only that, I will also remember the people I worked with who are as passionate as I am about trying to do the right thing for the wildlife that lives near us. The fence-trap removal team made sure that in this important tortoise nesting area, the next born youngsters will not be at risk of dying. I believe that day we made a difference.