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Published: July 13th 2006
Galapagos Hawk
Just watching out for its mid mornng snack...Day 3
We had sailed to the island of Espanola overnight and started our morning with a hike on the islan. Shockingly the beach was full of Sea Lions! Maybe I haven´t been making it clear, but they are EVERYWHERE in Galapagos, and they are fantastic. Even though you get very used to seeing them, you never get tired of them. They are just funny! Here we saw the babies nursing from their moms. The babies that we saw were probably 3 feet long and they would just wiggle up to their moms who were (surprise, surprise) napping, and latch on. There were Iguanas everywhere on the rocks. They´re lying on top of each other and some rocks would have literally 10 Iguanas on it. We did see them walk around, but I never saw one move very fast, although apparently they´re capable of it.
Each evening Roberto would give us a briefing on what we would be seeing and doing each day and EVERY time that he told us that we might see a certain animal, we did. Without fail. So when he told us that this island is particularly full of birds we believed him, but I don´t
think any of us expected to see what we saw.
First of all we disembarked to see the Galapagos Hawk just sitting on a big rock that had a plague on it. Again, it´s endemic to Galapagos and one of the major natural predators. Then we saw Blue Boobies. For those of you that are not ¨Boobie Experts¨they are just distinguished by the color of their feet. In fact, that´s how the birds tell the species apart too. When it´s mating season they walk around doing a high stepping dance showing off their blue feet saying (according to Roberto) ¨Here I am, see my nice blue feet, very nice, very sexy blue feet, want to mate with me? The other blue boobies say¨Wow, very nice, very sexy blue feet¨and they mate. The Nasca boobies however, have red feet. I don´t imagine I have to go through that whole thing again, I think if you substitute red for blue, you´ll get the picture. Anyway, the red feet stick with red feet, blue with blue and so the species go on and prosper.
The best part of the trip however was the Albatross (or Albatrosses - there were several). They
Marine Iguana
They win any staring contest... are the funniest birds. We stopped for probably 15 minutes beside a nest and I really do mean BESIDE the nest, we were probably only 10 feet away. A mommy Albatross was sitting on (and most of the time she really was sitting ON) a baby Albatross who was SO fuzzy and cute. The adults are probably almost waist high and the baby was probably 15 cm high. It was amazing that the mother was completely non bothered by the group of tourists gawking and snapping photos. The only thing bothering her were the two male Albatrosses that were hanging around hitting on her. Since they were not her husband she was completely uninterested by their flirting and showing off, but they kept it up anyway. They would walk around swaying their heads way to one side and then back ( like an overly exagerated tough guy swagger) and then face each other, open their beaks way up, pause, then snap at each other and start to sword fight with their beaks. Then they´d stop, pause and do it again. This went on and on and on. We then noticed another albatross behind us and he walked around us, around
Marine Iguana
basking in the sun in true reptillian fashion.. another group of tourists and up to the nest. Turns out, he´s the dad! He said Hello to mom and baby and then turned to the yahoo´s hanging around and told them off. It didn´t take long. The other two didn´t leave but they certainly got the hint and stopped hitting on his wife. Then mom took off and it was Dads turn to take care of the baby. Mom started to wander off towards the ocean in search of lunch. But after walking about 50 feet she stopped at another nest, with another few albatrosses and had a chat for a while. Apparently it´s quite a nice neighborhood and everyone´s friendly. Roberto managed to get video of this which we´ll try to eventually get onto the blog but again the technical difficulties are a bit daunting at this point.
We finally tore ourselves away and walked further down the island to the airport. The Albatross Airport. It´s a large clear area at the top of a cliff that apparently has perfect updrafts for takeoff and landing. It was hilarious. We stood there and watch as Albatross after Albatross would come walking from wherever they were, walk towards the
Cleaning time
Not a care in the world edge, and take off. They were even sort of lining up like planes in a queue on the runway. You could practically hear ¨Albatross Number 425 you´re cleared for take off¨ ¨Roger that, taxi-ing¨ In fact, you could hear it, because we were all making airport jokes. We´re funny too you know, not just the animals. The Albatrosses were definately a highlight of the trip
The island also had a large blow hole where the surf would come and hit the rock and go shooting up 30 m into the air. It was a great morning
That afternoon we spent some time on a white sand beach. Unfortunately one of the BIG boats was there at the same time as us. There are Cruises of 80 to 100 people including many small children and when they´re in the same place as you , much of the tranquility is missing. One of the big boats was a National Geographic tour and we don´t know much about it except that someone told us that it costs $7000 per person!
We also went snorkling from that beach out to a big rock 100 m out or so. We saw a
large Ray (we saw manta rays and golden rays on this trip and please don´t ask me to identify which was which) swimming along - they´re so gracefull. We saw a puffer fish which are just funny, non-aerodynamic looking things - even when they´re not inflated (we saw a dead - inflated one on the beach one day). Again we saw several reef sharks, one just briefly before it swam away, but another two were lurking under a rock and we kept diving down to get a look at them. Roberto found a Sea Cucumber, which really looks and feels like a cucumber, but it´s so much more exciting for some reason. He also found a sea urching and told us that the fish swimming under us are damsel fish and that they´re very territorial and that if he were to put the sea urchin in their territory they´d move it out. So he did, and they did! Man, this guy is practically a prophet. It was really funny, as soon as he set it down a fish swam over and bumped it out of the way, then it came back and bumped it further and then it seemed to
albatros and chick
I don´t think I can emphasise enough how close we were be okay with it.
And thus ended day 3. Well actually, that was only about 5 oclock but basically all the evenings went like this. As we got back on board they´d give us a quick hot snack. Shower and change. Sit up on deck drinking Cerveza´s and coke, have a snack, write notes (Luckily I actually made notes each day otherwise I would not be able to provide you folk with these epic blog entries) chat, read etc. Then we´d chat some more and then start to make Ït´s 7:45 is it too early to go to bed¨comments. Struggle through to 8 ish and then head for bed. Some of the people were quite sea sick. Shelagh was a little rough but not bad the whole time and I seemed to be fine...but I think Shelagh will tell you more about that on the next entry.
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Richard
non-member comment
Air Canada could take Lessons
That sounds great, Air Canada could take lessons from the Albatross, maybe they could get their flights out on time.