Wednesday, May 9, 2001 -- Santa Cruz Island

Today was a big land-based day, visiting an actual "city," Puerto Ayora, on Santa Cruz Island, home of the Charles Darwin Research Center. Their mission is to collect, breed, raise, and repatriate the giant tortoises of the various islands. Their most famous resident is "Lonesome George," the last remaining Giant Tortoise from Pinta Island. There is a $10,000 reward for anyone who can find a living or (now that cloning is a reality) deceased Pinta Tortoise in any zoo or collection in the world, so George will have a mate. He does share his pen with two females who are as genetically close to him as possible, but he has so far shown absolutely no interest in them as anything other than friends.

The pangas took us to a dock at the Research Station, and we immediately saw a cute little lava heron and a great blue heron. We toured through the station and saw the little baby tortoises. They keep them there until they are five years old, at which point they are only about the size of a large man's hand, and then release them on their native islands. Then we saw some adults, which are quite impressive. Of course, since my mother was there, we got to see a couple of pairs mating. The females are about half the size of the males, and the males make an incredibly loud groaning noise during the act, which is the only time tortoises ever make noise.

Interestingly, the normal prickly pear cacti on Santa Cruz grow as tall as a tree and with a protective bark, so as to protect themselves from the tortoises. On other islands, like Genovesa, they have soft spines because they have no predators. There are only three kinds of cactus in the islands: prickly pear, lava, and candelabra.

After going through the Research Station, we walked into and through the town of Puerto Ayora. It was an incredibly hot day, and probably the first day we had constant sun, and I was definitely feeling the effects. We took a minibus up to a private ranch in the highlands where they served us lunch and had a swimming pool for our use. Mom and I got off the bus to walk the last mile, which seemed like a good idea until I realized that I was way too hot and overtired from the heat and humidity, and was getting very sick and cranky. Sitting in the shade in the restaurant, drinking lots of cool liquids, and having some lunch definitely revived me somewhat, and the highlands were quite a bit cooler than the town. We ate with Gils DeRoy, whose sister, Tui, is probably the best-known Galápagos photographer (although she now lives in New Zealand). Their family is originally from Belgium, and they moved to the Galápagos when Tui was about two; Gils was born on the islands. He was a very interesting lunch companion. He seemed somewhat relieved to hear that the US social security system was probably as underfunded, corrupt, and bankrupt as the Ecuadorian one, and very interested to hear that neither I nor the other woman about my age had any expectation of ever seeing social security money. In the Galápagos, I think people get a very twisted picture of the US, since the only people they tend to meet are those who can afford to visit and take these expensive cruises.

After lunch, we took the minibus up to another ranch to walk through the highland forest to look for tortoises in the wild. This farmer's land happens to have some tortoise highways running through it, and borders parkland where there are tortoises to be found, and he has found a way to make use of that attraction by guiding tourists out to take a look at them. We found first a huge one, without having had to walk too far. It was quite impressive...for some reason much more so than seeing them in the Research Station. After taking a look at him for a while, we walked through the forest for a while, saw some interesting forest plants, and a big tortoise mud hole, and were about to return to the bus, assuming that we couldn't find any more. But just as we turned back, the rancher came out to say that they'd found a smaller one, so we went to check her out. She maybe was 20-30 years old, which would make the big one well over 50; we don't actually know if they were male or female...I'm just assuming from size and the way the guides referred to them.

The huge tortoise (note person's elbow at right)

After we returned to the bus, the rancher had watermelon and water for us, which was a treat. He was building some restrooms and a restaurant area, so he had really found a way to keep his land and to benefit from preservation of the natural state of the area. There are a lot of efforts to eradicate non-indigenous plants in the highlands, so we could hear chainsaws clearing all day long. This took a little time to get used to, since the sound of a chainsaw is rarely a good thing in my head. Yet another difference between the Galápagos and the Northwest. On the way back, we had the option to visit some kind of cave, but even my mom thought she was hot enough and tired enough to skip it.

When we got back to the town, we had the option to go souvenir shopping and to stay in town for a while, but neither mom nor I are big shoppers and we could get a nice cold drink on the ship, so we decided to return. When the panga took us back to the Polaris, we found that the swells were so high (maybe 7-8 feet?), that we couldn't really get safely from the zodiac to the ship. At one point, our guide got onto the steps up to the entrance to the ship, and a wave actually knocked it off its spot so that she and one of the crew were sort of hanging off of it over the water. Very exciting for her. We ended up circling the ship for 20-30 minutes until they got the stairs put out on the other side, which was slightly more in the lee of the swells, and we got ourselves off. Actually, if you timed it just right, you could take a little elevator up to the platform and not even have to step up.

 

New Animal Tally
Giant Tortoises	Lava heron

Thursday, May 10, 2001 -- Genovesa Island

Today we visited Genovesa Island, which is really quite remarkable. As usual, we thought we'd seen nearly everything, and even though the guides kept telling us that it was a cool island, we just didn't get it until we got there. The bay, Darwin Bay, is a huge, submerged caldera, so it is very protected from the ocean, and the entrance is a very narrow channel. They set up a depth finder to display on the lounge television monitors as we were leaving the bay at the end of the day, and you really could see the depth jump from too deep to register to just a few fathoms, and then back to immeasurable depths after crossing the rim of the caldera.

There are very few lizards or crabs on Genovesa because the water is too warm for the algae that they eat to grow, so the whole island is birds birds birds. We disembarked onto a white coral sand beach, where we slowly began to notice that there were great frigate birds and swallow-tailed gulls nesting all over the place. This was the one island where, if we had it to do over again, we would have brought the video camera ashore, because we could hear bird calls constantly. Simply the audio portion of the film would have been great to hear later.

Great frigatebirds, waiting for the girls to fly by

This is the only island where we could see red-footed boobies, which are the only ones who perch. They have a rare white phase, which makes them look very similar to the nazca boobies, so you tell the difference by looking to see if they are perching in a tree.

Red-footed boobies can have blue bills

I can't imagine how the red-footed boobies ever get their nests built. Every time we saw one flying around with a stick in his mouth, he'd be dive-bombed by great frigate birds who would chase him until they either stole the stick right from him, or knocked it out of his mouth.

Immature red-footed booby

The male frigate birds had staked out their turf, built their nests, and were busily trying to impress the girls with their inflated red neck pouches. After landing, we took a very short walk in a loop inland from the beach, where we saw more swallow-tailed gulls, red-footed boobies, and great frigate birds. After that, we took another short walk over rough lava to a cliff side overlooking the bay. On the way, we saw another sea lion in a kindergarten pool, along with a lava heron, and on the way back caught a great picture of a yellow-crowned night heron, looking irritably down at me.

Yellow-crowned night heron

By this day, I was getting really sick of People. I have to say that my fellow US citizens were by far the most annoying portion of the trip, and if I had a choice in the future, I might try to take a trip with a more international group of passengers. Of course, I'd probably find them at least as obnoxious.

In the afternoon, we took a zodiac cruise along the caldera edge to look more closely at the cliff side. We saw tons of red-billed tropicbirds, boobies, frigate birds, and swallow-tailed gulls. We also saw more fur sea lions, which look more bear-like than their California or Galapagos sea lion cousins.

 

New Animal Tally
Red-footed booby	Yellow-crowned Night Heron

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last modified: January 30, 2002