What are we up to, now that the monsoon is here?

It’s mid-November, and though there are days when it feels like the rain would never stop falling, there are also days when I wonder if the monsoon had arrived (of course it has, remember the recent floods in Perlis and Kedah?).

After successfully carrying out Turtle Awareness Programs in 15 schools, we are now conducting questionnaire surveys with fishermen who live in villages along the major rivers in Terengganu. So far, we have interviewed more than 70 fishermen in 7 rivers—Keluang, Marang, Merchang, Paka, Dungun, Kerteh and Kemaman Rivers. Between now and the end of the month, we should be able to cover the remaining 3 rivers–Besut, Setiu and Terengganu Rivers.

For those who are interested, our questionnaire survey has 60 questions that are divided into five sections:

Section A: Background information about the respondent and his experience as a fisherman/hobbyist
Section B: Presence (or absence) of terrapins/tortoises in the river and the threats they face
Section C: Terrapin’s nesting information
Section D: Conservation of terrapins/tortoises
Section E: Miscellaneous questions

The final questionnaire that we are now using has been modified and improved upon at least four times. Before we finalized the questionnaire, we have conducted some trial surveys with our fishermen-friends in the Setiu River.

Our questionnaire surveys are very interesting (I know, self praise is no praise, eh?) because each survey involves going to new places that we’ve never been to before, meeting headmen and villagers who later became our friends-in-conservation, discovering interesting stories about the population of river terrapins (or the absence of) in the respective rivers, and best of all, these surveys open up the possibilities of TCC starting new conservation projects along some rivers!

P/S: Some pictures of our surveys are found on the TCC Facebook page :D