Stacey’s 30th Birthday Extravaganza

Day 5 gets its very own post as it was the best day.  On Day 5 my fellow passengers and I headed off to the oldest island in the archipiélago…Española…which is approximately 3.5 million years old.  Despite the fact that Española is one of the smallest of the major islands, it has the richest diversity of life…both flora and fauna.  It is the home to lots of wildlife including:

• Marine iguanas – found only in the Galapagos, marine iguanas are the only iguanas in the world that swim and feed in the ocean.  The marine iguanas of Española are the only ones that change colors during the mating season.

Marine Iguanas (piled on top of each other for warmth)

• Blue Footed Boobies – found in multiple places near the Pacific Ocean from California through Chile they are most plentiful (and most famous) in the Galapagos (right).
• Nazca Booby-found in few places outside of the Galapagos, these birds are famous  for practicing habitual plentiful siblicide. They lay two eggs several days apart.

If both eggs hatch, the elder chick will push its sibling out of the nest area, leaving it to die of thirst or cold. The parent booby will not intervene and the younger chick will inevitably die. It is believed that two eggs are laid so that one remains an insurance in case the other gets destroyed or eaten e.g. by gulls, or the chick dies soon after hatching.

Nazca Booby

• Lava lizards – Lots of lava lizards all over the Galapagos but the largest and most colorful species are found on Española.

Male Lava Lizard

Female Lava Lizard

On the morning of Day 5, we spent several hours at a beautiful white sand beach near Gardner’s Bay.  There were tons and tons of sea lions as well as some crazy mockingbirds that would land on your arm, try to get in your backpack, try to open your water bottle…all sorts of stuff.  The really striking thing about all of the wildlife on the Galapagos islands is that it is all very, very tame.  The animals have few, if any, natural predators and the naturalist guides are militant about making sure the tourists do nothing to harm or scare the animals.  Consequently it is easy to get very close to the animals for pictures…helpful when you’re not carrying a big camera with a telephoto lens.

Crazy Mockingbird

Gardner Island was the site of our best snorkeling of the trip where I got some great underwater shots.  When we first got in the water there was this lone sea lion cruising around…getting a little too close for comfort if you ask me but he never touched me.  At first it was a little unnerving but eventually I got used to it and decided to try and get some pictures.  Here are the results…unfortunately sea lions are too fast for my digital camera delay so I never got the whole sea lion in the picture. 

Here are a school of fish I was not able to identify in the book later…

…but this one is a King Angelfish:

Also, a picture of the reef….

…and a sea urchin of some variety. And, of course, a baby sea lion that was following me around.  Enjoy the photos!

Santa Cruz Island

Hola chicos! Well, I’m off the boat and have tons of photos, etc. to get organized from the Galapagos so please bear with me as I try to get updated this week. I spent the past seven nights on the lovely catamaran Nemo II with eleven other passengers: 2 Belgian, 6 English, 1 Dutch, 1 American, 1 Chinese and of course the 7 Ecuadorian crew members. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to enjoy living on a boat for a week but as it turns out…I had a great time and really enjoyed the small ship atmosphere.

Santa Cruz Island, the objects in the sand are remains of a pier from the U.S Military Base from WWII

Sally Lightfoot Crabs

I only got seasick once (when we departed on choppy seas just after eating dinner) so thought that was pretty good…oh, and no sunburn for me despite the fact that we were on the equator…this is excellent news for my WPP (Wrinkle Prevention Program).

My home for 7 nights…Nemo II

Salt Water Lagoon on Santa Cruz…iguana in the forefront and flamingos on the right

Brown Pelican

So, the Galapagos. Maybe a little refresher on the significance of the Galapapagos Islands would be useful here… 

The Galapapagos Islands were first discovered by a European in 1535 though evidence found on the islands suggests that people may have inhabited the islands at some point prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Initially the islands were used by pirates and other seafaring characters as an isolated point of rest between South American and Central America. Whalers and fur-seal hunters later arrived and ultimately decimated the islands’ population of giant tortoises as the tortoises could survive on board the ships without food or water for long periods of time and thus provided a source of fresh protein for the sailors.

Galapagos Penguins 

Cactus growing out of a lava rock

Ecuador annexed the islands in 1832 and as a condition of successful annexation it needed to establish a colony on the islands. Due to the isolation and barren topography of the Galapagos it was a hard sell to get Ecuadorians to want to move there. In the end, the solution was to establish a prison colony…one without an actual prison as the isolation of the islands was considered secure enough and the prisoners began to settle in the Galapagos permanently. Even now many of the residents of the islands are descendents of the original prisoners sent in the early 19th century. Currently only 1.2% of the islands land mass is inhabited and the rest is national park of Ecuador.

View of Pinnacle Rock (and Nemo II) from top of Bartolome

View of sunken crater from top of Bartolome

Ultimately the Galapapagos Islands became most famous for being the basis of Charles Darwins’ ongoingly-controversial-in-religious-circles book on evolution, The Origin of the Species. Darwin arrived on the HMS Beagle in 1835 where he first noticed the variations in species of finches and tortoises between the different islands. This led to his developed theories on evolution including those of natural selection. After Darwin the islands served as a military base for the U.S. during WWII and briefly as a penal colony for Ecuador in the mid-twentieth century. In the end, though, Ecuador chose to establish the Galapapagos Islands as a national park and tourist/conservation/research location in 1959.

Under the sea…

You can barely see them but there are some long, ribbon-like jelly fish creatures all over.  I didn’t think the picture would take but amazingly you can kind of see them.

The first day we became acquainted with our fellow passengers and went on a brief afternoon hike on the island of Santa Cruz where we saw Sally Lightfoot Crabs, flamingos and penguins in a salt water lagoon as well as the amazingly desolate volcanic landscapes which are included in the pictures above (I seem to have acquired a spot on my camera lens so many of these pictures have a little round flaw in one corner…sorry about that…I suspect my camera may not have escaped the horse-back riding adventure unscathed).