Evolution in action
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
1
46
165
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Galapagos Islands,
Ecuador
Monday, July 18, 2005
to hit the Galapagos in late-July. Wrong!!! No berths to be had
late-July or August. A rapid plan change (all organised via a three
way satellite phone conversation from the middle of the jungle), a
mad avian dash from Cusco to Lima (so grey and dull we walked around
for an hour and retired to watch TV in our hotel until we left),
plane from Lima to Tumbes, bus across the border to Guayaquil and we
were in Ecuador.
We stayed one (insurance) day in Guayaquil, visited the green iguanas
in the park across the street (they outnumbered the cats in Buenos
Aires and let me pat them) and then it was off to the airport again
Old men fighting
.Ecuadorian Spanish is so unintelligible David tried to argue the taxi
fare up from $2.50 to $4.00!
We (and our 727) entered the Galapagos National Park on 7 July at San
Cristobal. This not the main airport for the Galapagos - Santa Cruz
is. But it's the tourist high season so they're resurfacing the
runway! We were met at the airport but don't imagine that meant
avoiding (or, in fact, didn't contribute to) wading through the chaos
that is any travel event in South America. It always seems to sort
itself out in the end though.
San Cristobal is a town, despite not being the main tourist port,
which sees its share of tourists. It has a tidy main street: on the
one side tee-shirt shops, restaurants, internet cafes, dive
operations or any combination of the above; on the other a working
fishing port being overrun by cruise boats (some luxury,
some "tourist", some very budget, yachts, a schooner, catamarans and
under-dressed gin palaces), inflatables zipping around like sprats
with their cargoes of tourists, pelicans and frigate birds hovering
and a colony of unconcerned sealions lolling on the rocks, the dock,
the boatramp and any unoccupied dinghy they could find
Sea iguana
.We joined the melee and eventually arrived at the Monserrat - a
cruiser better than we could have afforded if we hadn't taken a last
minute booking (the same was true for most of the passenger
complement - to the chagrin of the family of six Americans who had
paid full price, even for their five-year-old). Nicely outfitted in
dark, highly polished wood and brocade in the salons, extravagantly
comfortable loungers on the decks and noxious diesel fumes in our
cabin.
Our first excursion did nothing to dispel Darwin's contention that it
was impossible to collect specimens here because you couldn't get far
enough away from the animals to shoot them
Sealions like to bob
! Everything is verycurious, often stubbornly inquisitive, and will follow you to check
you out. We went to a beach about 500m from the end of the runway.
We were not allowed to touch the animals or approach closer than 2m -
this, apparently, is not the information the wildlife has rec
eived.
We eased in to wildlife watching with a female sealion and rather
large pup relaxing on the volcanic rocks above the breakers.
Basically, on land, sealions are enormous self-turning sausages who
snort and cough a lot. They have limpid chocolate eyes and the
cutest puppy dog faces, with fish crunching fangs and violent
breath. Sealion pups, on land, are (not very) miniatures of their
mums and feed noisily and continuously
Sealions like to sunbathe too
. They don't really mind howclose you get as long as you don't touch - minimum safe distance is
about 50cm and that is rewarded with a bark and blast of fetid breath
but no backwards movement on their part. We strolled along the beach
picking our way through portularcas and Galapagos morning glory and
watching sealions playing in the surf. Sealions like to body surf,
lie at the edge of the water and be pushed around by the wave wash,
and they like to bob (which is why they will go to great lengths to
clamber up on moored boats). At the end of the beach was a colony of
about 50 sealions. They were happily collapsed in heaps as far as
they had managed to drag themselves up the beach. They were snorting
and coughing and grumbling at each other. The pups were greedily and
focussedly feeding while adults rolled in the sand, clambered over
each other, had mini territorial battles, delicately scratched their
noses with their three perfect toenails (at the fold of their back
flippers), flopped, sneezed and ignored the 40 tourists sitting about
a metre away on the outskirts of the group
Swimming sea iguana
.On the way back we were dive-bombed by a variety of finches (who
started the whole furore really, Darwin theorizing that if God was
really in charge he would have shown more imagination than to use
finches to fill practically every evolutionary niche on the island -
particularly when they are so bad at it: take, for example, the
vampire finch, which fills the niche of the vampire bat, but can't
peck a hole in animals' skin so has to wait for an insect to do it)
and were entertained by lava lizards charging across the path and
stopping mid-way to do press-ups. Their scales are pointed and
raised like feathers. We had our feet cleaned by the Galapagos
mockingbird who cleans parasites from the marine iguanas (and
gringos) and who otherwise eats the stomachs of lava lizards
Tortoise in Santa Cruz
.The next morning we started our excursion to Puerto Suarez on Isla
Espanola clambering across salt slicked rocks upsetting the Sally
Lightfoot crabs because a sealion and pup had chosen the boat ramp
for a siesta.
The correct collective noun for a group of marine iguanas is a pile.
Marine iguanas are completely immune to being touched - this is
because they life their lives in constant contact with at least four
others. They are squat, dinosaur shaped, black with a silvery white
crest of spines running down their back, with a spreading Buddha
belly and fetching salt crust cap. Sometimes you will see one tinged
with red but they blend into the rock better without the flamboyant
touches. They have cruel looking hook claws but only for rock
scaling. On land they seem to spend their days draped over other
iguanas and staring vaguely but fixedly into the middle distance.
Getting to the water is a meditative process but once in the water
they are rocket charged. They use only their whip-like tail to swim
and can achieve fantastic speeds along the surface. They dive to
feed - seaweed is their food of choice (although we saw some in
Isabella who had obviously converted to watermelon and lettuce).
Unfortunately they are unable to digest the seaweed au natural and
having chomped on sufficient return to their pile to heat themselves,
like self-contained crockpots, until the seaweed is cooked and they
can digest it. This leads to their rather attractive habit of
spitting increasingly hot salt out their noses.
Having exhausted the entertainment potential of cleaning salty iguana
snot off the camera lens we moved onto the main event for Espanola -
boobies. Blue footed boobies to be exact. The boobies are nesting
at the moment. Part of the boobie courtship dance (aside from
considered foot raising, wing flexing and whistling (him)/cooing
(her)) is the male bringing the female small stones or sticks as nest
building offerings. Having accepted these she promptly slings them
out, builds a shallow depression on the ground (no exterior cladding
in evidence) and lays two eggs. This being a wilderness area with
stones, twigs, lava crevices, bushes and other architectural
inconveniences, the nest building site of choice is the nice, clear
path for the tourists - no chance at all of maintaining the 2m
clearance and, even though they're brooding precious eggs or chicks,
absolutely no reaction from the boobies. They are everywhere - you
can hardly move three paces without having to avoid another boobie
nest or boobie.
Blue footed boobies have somber faces, white, tipped by a straight,
sturdy, silvery beak finished with a ferocious downward hook. They
have cartoon black flinty eyes and speckled brown and white bodies.
Their wings are disproportionately long for the bird's body and very
narrow. Judging from the fledging chicks it takes a while to learn
how to fold them away properly. They have way too large feet - you
never see a boobie standing except with its feet tangled - these are
screaming sky blue. Their feet are temperature sensing - in the
mornings they sit on the eggs to keep them just warm enough and in
the afternoons they stand over them to cool them with the shade of
their bodies. When boobies fly their silly feet tuck away and their
wings become perfectly proportioned. When they fish they are arrow
sleek and lightning fast.
It's the cool, dry season at the moment. This means it rains as much
as in the wet season but the raindrops are smaller. As often as not
you will find yourself walking in cloud or mist and be as wet as if
it was "raining". It was "raining" now. [The definition of dejected
is a sodden, gangly, once fluffy but now bedraggled and matted boobie
chick hunched in the "rain" hoping lunch will arrive soon.] We went
to see a blowhole in the cliffs. To get there we walked through the
remainder of the island sporting saltbush and clay and getting our
sports sandals nice and slippery wet on the inside with a treacherous
sticky clay film on the outside. Unfortunately no marine iguanas
were swimming near the blow hole so we didn't see the very rare
Galapagos aerial iguana and we started for home. The track home was
a volcanic boulder field - difficult enough to negotiate in the dry,
very difficult in slippery sports sandals and icy dripping clothes,
damn near impossible when you couldn't just concentrate on not
falling and breaking something but had to be concerned with not
stomping on an unconcerned, unco-operative iguana or boobie.
On Santa Fe Island the sealion pups are just old enough to be
independent and just young enough to be dumb. We spent far too much
time on the beach the next morning being snuffled, nuzzled and
sealion-handled. They just don't have any fear and will come loping
up to you as if you're possibly Mum or a bush or a boobie but
probably worthy of a game. One managed to undo David's sports
sandals.
We were here to visit our first land iguanas and a colony of nesting
pelicans. Santa Fe, like Espanola, is lavishly covered in salt brush
on the lowlands and on the highlands cactus. This means that Santa
Fe land iguanas have not had as much trouble surviving the lean times
as iguanas on some of the other islands. A healthy land iguana runs
to about five feet in length and is mottled black and brown with
irregular patches of yellow. He also has irregular patches of
shedding skin (it seems an iguana takes about a year to completely
shed its skin by which time the cycle has started again - so they
spend much of their lives looking vaguely tatty). They have pebbly
scaled heads in greyish white, old man wattles and stumpy baby-fat
legs. They stare at you (unlike marine iguanas who stare through
you) with the intensity and focus of someone on dope. We saw one so
fat his spines had fallen over and he wouldn't have moved if you'd
tried to pick him up. He was hunched near his personal cactus supply
and clearly wasn't moving for anyone.
Up where the saltbush had given way to ghost white, wind ravished
trees and battered cactus the brown pelicans make their nests. They
build a wide, sparse, flat nest about two or three feet off the
ground and settle in for quality family time. Every day we are
astounded by the beauty and mastery of the pelicans in flight - on
the ground, especially making the transition from air to ground to
air again, they are comical and all out of proportion. They are
completely unconcerned by our up-close scrutiny and, keeping a wary
eye on us, continue with their daily toilette.
For mid-morning entertainment we snorkelled with the sealions. First
we played around with a stingray and a green sea turtle and then we
headed over to where the sealions where lolling on the rocks and
snorting. As soon as we approached a dozen piled into the water
looking for a game. Self-turning sausages turned into lithe, sinuous
creatures of another world. They desperately wanted to play with us
but we were too slow and lump-like for the game they had in mind.
They kept tickling with their whiskers at your hand or leg and
shooting up towards your stomach, bullet-like, only to veer away at
the last minute. They tried hard to encourage us to play but in the
end we just weren't up for it and they quickly decided they provided
their own best entertainment. We watched entranced.
The terrain of the islands varies enormously. At San Cristobal
there is a scattering of volcanic boulders on the beach and semi-
succulent morning glory and portulacas on the sand, but then it's
lush tropical vegetation. Until you reach the highlands where the
road verges feature orange groves and blackberry brambles, grass and
bracken. Most islands are low lying and sport only saltbush and
scraggy sea grasses. Bartolome is a blasted reddish brown volcanic
cone. Isabella is like a giant black rock meringue where the lava
has rolled sluggishly towards the sea. On South Plaza Island
volcanic scoria, portulacas and cactuses reign. The islands are
very beautiful, but harsh, wind swept and unforgiving. The sun (when
it's shining) is unrelenting and there is not much reprieve in the
shade.
It is islands like South Plaza where the iguana population has
suffered during La Nina events when the succulent plants they feed on
dry up. Here you commonly saw the desiccated bodies of the iguanas
that didn?t make it through the last summer. Their skeletons look
even more dinosaur like than the lizard itself and with the
background of strange growling, snorting and roaring coming from the
sealion colony on the shore it is easy to imagine yourself
transported to some sort of Jurassic Park.
South Plaza has a large sealion colony who habitually sunbathes on
the boat ramp. Arriving in an inflatable and clapping at them is
enough to get them to begrudgingly abandon their deck chairs for
sufficient time for you to land. A colony is made up of females and
young and one dominant male. The males can weigh up to 300kgs and,
through some strange hormonal thing when they are dominant, they
develop a high dome on their heads. During the period the male is
dominant he does not eat or sleep but simply patrols the waters off
the colony beach and occasionally, when no other males are lurking,
services the females. After about 20 or 30 days the male is
exhausted and under-nourished and easy prey for another male to
challenge him. Whoever loses then limps their way to the cliff at
the other end of the island where the loser males congregate to lick
their wounds and commiserate. Actually, after 20 or 30 days without
food or sleep, what they actually do is eat, spill beer on their
Hawaiian shirts, lie to each other about their exploits and hang in
the sun. The loser males look considerably happier than the guy
getting all the girls down on the beach.
Floreana is the island where the Galapagos flamingo has its home.
I thought Chilean flamingos had improbable plumage, but they have
nothing on the Galapagos ones. The Galapagos flamingo is entirely
apricot (but the sort of apricot you would get in candyfloss -
technically pastel but somehow violent). The underside of the
wing is entirely black. They are so very beautiful and yet so
extremely silly. They have a comic book honk, seem constantly
to be ruffling their feathers as if offended by answering honks,
when they take off they are all gangly legs and
necks and bulbous beaks. But when they fly they are luminous and
graceful (probably need to work on the landing bit though).
As a means of communicating with the world they were removed from a
whaling captain set up a post box (in 1793) at Post Office Bay.
Passing ships, traders, buccaneers, pirates, whoever, would stop by
and pick up letters and parcels and see that they were delivered.
The tradition remains and there are probably a thousand postcards in
the post box waiting for visiting tourists to continue the tradition
(hand delivery is better but dropping in the post when you get home
is acceptable). Some had been there years, some only weeks. One was
addressed to a couple and said ?Sign this card if you wish these two
a happy honeymoon. Leave here until 2006? ? there was no more room
to sign. We left seven post cards and collected two (left that day)
to deliver to Auckland (we have since relinquished them to Michelle
(an English tourist on our boat) who will be in Auckland before us).
At the Charles Darwin Centre on Santa Cruz we met many of the
tortoises that are re-establishing the Galapagos populations. There
are thirteen distinct species on the islands now (having probably
drifted on the ocean currents from the mainland). Tortoises became
endangered because, at between 120-270kgs, there's quite a lot of
eating on a tortoise. Also, they can survive for up to a year without
food or water which means that ships just used to cruise by, pick up
a couple, store them somewhere out of the way on the ship upside down
and, anytime in the next year, they had a ready supply of fresh meat. Like
most turtles and tortoises they also have that really inefficient
breeding system where they lay eggs and then abandon them. The nests
get trampled, birds find the eggs or the young in the nest, and they
get picked off on the way to the water.
At the breeding centres there is no mixing of the blood lines.
Tortoises born at the centres are kept for five years before they are
released back to their island. At Isabella's breeding centre they
have taken a population of 27 (3 males and 24 females) and
reintroduced a population in the wild of over 700.
It is quite difficult, apparently, to tell some species apart. So,
unfortunately, tortoises that have been rescued from being pets are
doomed to lonely lives in the males' or females' pens because no one
is sure which tortoise is which species and who should be let loose
with whom. They seem pretty happy though. They have plenty of space
to lumber around and food is delivered regularly (Monday, Wednesday,
Friday). We watched a feeding pad territorial fight between two of
the males. It was like watching a fight in an old peoples? home.
The tortoises went at each other by gumming each other with their
toothless mouths at the speed that you might if you were a bit shaky
on a walker (tortoises run at 300m an hour). The fight was over when
one of the tortoises completely retracted into his shell and then
rammed the other one jamming his neck between the sharp edge of his
shell and the sharp edge of his opponent's. No hard feelings though,
everyone then went back to meditatively chewing their aloe.
We met Lonesome George. George is the last of the Pinta Island
tortoises. They think he?s about 110 years old. He was found in
1967 and moved to the Darwin Centre in 1972. He shares his enclosure
with two Santa Cruz female tortoises (being the closest genetic type
to George himself), but George just isn't interested. There is a
$5,000 reward for anyone finding a female Pinta Island tortoise. But
it really looks like George is the last of his species.
Although there are the breeding centres there is also an obsessive
culture of non-intervention. I can understand that the boobie chick
with the beak twisted like a sardine can key should not be whisked
off to a sanctuary. He will die when he fledges because he cannot
fend for himself and that is just the ecosystem in action. But what
about the sealion pups with gashes around their necks from nets (one
of whom still had the net attached and would die a slow, strangling
death as he grew). The nets aren't a natural part of the ecosystem -
why is cutting the pup free interfering with a natural order? In
Peru I had the same discussion with our Manu guide. Our truck ran
over a 4m (unidentified) snake. On investigation the snake had been
stabbed and struck on the head with a rock (probably by local
villagers who are afraid of snakes in general or by children who are
what children are). In addition we had just run over it and bits of
its innards where now decorating the road. It was agreed that the
snake would die and it was moved into the ditch. I asked the guide
if the snake was going to die, slowly, over a period of three or four
hours, we didn't kill it to stop it suffering. He shrugged and
said, "I don't know".
In the afternoon we saw Santa Cruz tortoises in the wild happily
wallowing in extravagant grass and mud (the mud drowns the
parasites). They're also quite fond of passionfruit and guavas which
grow wild here. A male Santa Cruz tortoise can grow up to 270kgs.
They are quite solitary or maybe it just takes too long to all get to
one place. The gatehouse had a couple of tortoise shells which
easily fit a fifteen year old in them. They're about 2cm thick and
that's after they've dried out once the tortoise dies. Areas of them
become quite translucent (like old fashioned stained glass) and, we
were surprised (not quite sure why although we've probably not
invested that much thought in the anatomy of tortoises over the
years) to discover part of the vertebrae and pelvis bones are
actually attached to the shell.
We finished our formal boat tour of the Galapagos with a trip to
Bartolome to climb the volcanic cone and admire the various volcanic
formations and check out the Galapagos penguin. And then onto North
Seymour where there is a breeding colony of magnificent frigate birds
(yes, that's their real name). Like pelicans these build wide, flat
nests, quite close to the ground in bushes rather than trees. The
birds are entirely black with the same somber faces, tipped by a
straight, sturdy beak finished with a ferocious downward hook as the
boobies. They have large jet eyes and wings shaped like bats. The
females have a white chest and their eyes are rimmed in brilliant
cobalt. The males have a hint of red at the throat. When an
attractive female passes in the vicinity the males inflate the "hint
of red" on their throats into a lollipop red balloon about the size
of the bird. Once a female has chosen a male they will sit together
on the nest and the male will throw one wing around the female.
Apparently, frigate birds do not always lay their eggs on their
nests, and have a habit of forgetting where they did lay them. This
doesn't seem to be diminishing the overall population of frigate
birds however.
We have spent the last seven days watching the pelicans, boobies,
frigate birds, and swallow tail gulls wheeling against either an icy
grey sky or a searingly blue one. Pelicans, like sealions, like to
bob and will regularly land on the water or the dinghy just to sit
and bounce on the water. Frigate birds do not have enough oil in the
feathers to adequately protect them from salt water. When they fish
it is a tentative scoop at the water. More often they will target
the fish schools and the pelicans and boobies will swoop in for the
fishing. Then the frigate birds hassle the boobies into dropping
their catch and collect the windfall. Periodically the frigate birds
have to seek out the two fresh water sources in the islands to wash
the salt from their feathers.
After the cruise we took ourselves to Isabella Islands for three
days. There are several nice walks on the southern part of the
island (where the airport is) and we wandered around happily soaking =0
Aup sunshine, a very relaxed atmosphere, walking over the folded
pavlova surface of the island and searching for wildlife. It became
very apparent that we had been hand fed wildlife over the past seven
days - finding it ourselves was much more difficult. Another thing
that was very noticeable was how well controlled the tourists on the
other islands must be to have had so little impact on the
survival/fright behaviour of the wildlife - we were easily able to
approach birds on the other islands within half a metre without any
kind of reaction and often had them come right up to us. On
Isabella, where there are children and dogs and cats, the wildlife is
much more skitty and won't let you within five metres (if you're
lucky).
We never saw the huge numbers of animals in one place that we had on
Espanola, Santa Fe or the Plazas but we spent our days accompanied by
flamingos, oyster catchers, terns, boobies, pelicans and warblers.
We found some sealions but Isabella has an excellent surf beach and
it's probably pretty hard work for the sealions. We were constantly
finding marine iguanas and the mud of the mangrove is very biodiverse
(especially if you've just walked in it).
On our last day we walked out to a point where David claimed to have
seen boobies roosting the previous day. There were no boobies in
trees although there was a collection of lagoons (remember the colour
of Swamp Thing?) and a lava tube leading right down to the sea. What
there was though was a school of sardines that had been driven
inshore by the feeding tuna. And that meant a feeding frenzy of
perhaps a hundred pelicans, boobies and gulls. We watched captivated
for forty minutes while boobies arrowed into the surf and pelicans
did the opposite. When a boobie hits the water it is folded up into
a spearhead shape, there is no splash and it will bob to the surface
like a surprised cork within a second clutching its score. When a
pelican hits the water it has spread its wings, dropped its feet and
is almost somersaulting in its attempt to decelerate. It fills its
pouch with water (and hopefully fish), leaves its head under while it
pushes out the water and emerges wolfing back sardines in a single
gulp. The sky was dense with circling birds and the water a churned
mire of diving or just surfaced birds. It was a spectacular end to a
spectacular ten days of wildlife overload.
