Sunday bird blogging

Some more finchiness: three species on Santa Cruz island.

You can't see the cactus finch to the right as clearly, but in the two pictures above it's easy to see how closely these birds are related; the feathers and the eyes are almost identical. It really is just those very prominent beaks that distinguish them.

Santa Cruz the sequel

Today we were on the north coast of Santa Cruz. After all the activity yesterday, today was much more low key and I don't have many photos.

Adventures in shopping

This is a jewelry store in Puerto Ayora that has no relevance to this story whatsoever, except that it's a retail establishment in the Galapagos, and I loved the stylized art nouveau gate and windows.

Obviously, fabulous shopping opportunities are not on anyone's list of reasons to visit the Galapagos. There aren't any snack bars or souvenir stands on the beaches we've been visiting, and we carry cameras and water bottles and not much else -- our rooms on the ship don't even have keys. But I was walking back from the Charles Darwin Research Center with Cathy, another woman from the expedition, when we saw an art gallery and went in to take a look. They had some nice jewelry, and beautiful carvings of fish and birds and iguanas that I immediately coveted.

But what originally caught my eye were the tapestries, huge colorful weavings of stylized fish and birds, done by a Peruvian textile artist named Maximo Laura. They were expensive. Very expensive. But I fell in love with a red and yellow rendering of fish that seemed to capture the magic of the Galapagos, and I rather impulsively told the young woman behind the counter that I would buy it.

She started to fold it up. And then I realized I couldn't buy it. Carlos, our tour manager, had suggested that we might want to buy something to wear on Halloween while we were in Puerto Ayora, so I stuck a couple of twenties in my pocket before we went ashore. But that was all the money I had, and this was definitely not a cash purchase anyway. My credit cards were back on the ship.

I reluctantly put the tapestry back in the pile and left with Cathy for the meetup point. She, very nicely, told me not to worry, that we'd figure out a way to get it, she'd even buy it for me and I could pay her back. I tried to tell myself that I was better off, it was too expensive, but after lunch I told Carlos the story and he arranged for me to go back to the ship instead of to the farm where we were going to see tortoises in the wild.

And that's what I did. Another woman, Shelley, decided to come along to see the tapestries, and we rode back to town, took a very choppy zodiac ride out to the ship, collected our credit cards, rode another zodiac back to town, and went to the gallery. Where Shelley also bought a tapestry.

You can see samples of Laura's work here. They're exquisite.

Plantation road

This little boy didn't care about all the strange visitors milling around trying the coffee and the rum. Not when there was that really cool truck up the road.

Bicycles

Yes, that's a warbler

A yellow warbler, to be precise. They're common in the Galapagos, and I've seen a lot of them, but this one catching a grub by the sugar plantation was the most photogenic.

Apparently I had to go all the way to Ecuador to finally get a decent picture of a fricking warbler.

El Trapiche

We took buses up into the highlands of Santa Cruz (a few intrepid souls biked up) to this plantation. Families that have farmed here since before the creation of the national park still do.

Only a few minutes out of Puerto Ayora the land changed dramatically. The arid grass and cactus gave way to lush humid green, ideal for growing sugar and coffee, flowers, and even giant tortoises making their slow deliberate way along the side of the road.

Some of the sugar grown here becomes rum, after the patient donkey above squeezes the juice from the sugar cane. We got samples of the cane to eat; and also got to try roasted coffee beans eaten with a couple of lumps of fresh brown sugar -- insanely delicious. We were offered samples of the rum as well, but I passed and went back for another coffee bean instead.

Paging Mr. Hitchcock

Then the frigatebirds swooped in for a visit, and for a few minutes the market was chaotic, a rush of wind and wing and feather. (By the time it occurred to me that video would be a much better way to record the scene, it was mostly over.)

There were probably only eight or ten of them in the battalion, but these birds are huge -- their wingspan can reach seven feet -- so when they circled around, flying under and through the open, low-roofed fish market, the thought that they would make fine, fine weapons did cross my mind.

They left as suddenly as they'd appeared, flying off or settling on the roof and nearby perches to plot their next attack.

It wasn't only birds who loved the fish market

Did someone say "fish market?

The fish market where I saw that booby had been mentioned as a place we should definitely go during our free time in Puerto Ayora. I thought, Okay -- stalls of clams or crabs or rows of big bulging fish eyes; there could be some fun photos there. I completely missed the obvious question: what happens when you hold an open air fish market surrounded by big birds who love love love fish and have no fear of humans?

Birds like these pelicans, for example. The birds circling over the market -- which is just a few tables pushed into a rectangle -- became obvious a few blocks away. It was fun to see the animals we've been observing in such pristine natural surroundings responding to a human environment -- a reminder that the issue isn't just preserving these wonderful creatures, it's figuring out how to make coexistence work.

Who, me?

A blue-footed booby, trying to look innocent while hanging out at the fish market in Puerto Ayora.

Pyramus and Thisbe

A female iguana at the Darwin Center, part of a captive breeding program that is restoring two colonies of land iguanas that were decimated by wild dogs. They breed the iguanas at the center, then repatriate them on the islands.

She's in a pen with male iguanas on both sides, but it seemed like she was focused on the handsome fellow in the picture below.

The iguanas won't actually be allowed to mate until the rainy season starts. But they are clearly anxious to get to know each other much better.

Land iguana

Familiar shape, different colors. The other iguana species of the Galapagos, the land iguana. Iguanas are surprisingly photogenic.

Diego

This cheerful fellow is Diego, the superstar stud of the Darwin Center.

He's an Espanola tortoise, who went to the San Diego zoo in the 1930's. He was returned to the Galapagos in 1977, when the few remaining Espanola tortoises had been removed to the Darwin Center for protection, and since then he's fathered more than 1700 children. His age is estimated to be around 130 years, so he's still late middle age for a giant tortoise and could have hundreds more children before he's done.

Peek a boo

One more, just because I love these shapes.

The pebbled patterns and curved shells of these strange creatures, almost abstract except for that one eye peeking out.

Hey, fellas!

I found the tortoises the strangest, most alien, of all the animals we've seen. But this pose cracks me up; it's the tortoise version of a bathing beauty. I especially love that back leg stretched out with the upturned foot.

Taking it slowly

A giant tortoise makes his way very carefully down a steep rocky slope. Climbing in and out of zodiacs and scrambling over those big lava boulders here has made me all too aware that my knees are way past their expiration date.

But watching these giant tortoises move with such heavy deliberation makes me feel positively balletic by comparison.

Charles Darwin Research Station

This was our first opportunity to see the famous giant tortoises of the Galapagos. (The islands are named for the tortoises; galapago is an old Spanish word meaning "saddle," which the shells of the highland species resemble.)

There's nothing in the picture for a sense of scale, so it's not obvious that although these tortoises are doing their best to appear very fierce and scary, they're actually babies, up to a couple of years old, and no more than a foot long, that are part of the captive breeding program at the Charles Darwin Center.

There are ten species of tortoise left. (Lonesome George, a tortoise who was the last member of an eleventh species, died last year without offspring, despite many attempts to breed him to females of closely related species.) Tortoises have a very long lifespan, so the tortoises bred at the Darwin Center live there for many years until they're big enough to be released in the wild.

Poison apple

Celso Montalvo, one of the wonderful naturalists, explains what happens if you eat the fruit of the poison apple tree.

(Hint: the name pretty much gives it away.)

Prickly pear

One of the amazing prickly pear trees.