Early this morning, we reached the northwestern coast of Santa Cruz Island. We arrived to Dragon Hill and landed there after breakfast, where the trail took us to a brackish water lagoon. There we found a very bright pink greater flamingo near the shore, as well as a great egret and several shore birds and Galapagos marine iguanas. We walked through a deciduous Palo Santo forest, where we encountered several species of finches, such as the small tree finch, the common cactus finch and the small beak ground finch.
We looked for one of the endemic species of reptiles from the islands: the Galapagos land iguana. This morning we found several of these iguanas resting under some dry bushes, while others were basking under the bright sun. This area is still part of a conservation program that began around the seventies with the eradication of introduced feral dogs that had diminished the land iguana population. Some of the adult iguanas were transferred to a small islet, where these animals were able to reproduce, and as soon as the offspring is about four years old, they are taken by the park wardens and released on Cerro Dragon, to re-populate this area. This has been a very successful project.
This afternoon, we moved to Daphne Major and during our navigation we had several activities; we offered a workshop on how to create paper beads, as well as a talk on Charles Darwin, and a wonderful art lesson with our onboard artist. At the end of the afternoon, we arrived to Daphne Major and sailed around it, while our expedition leader Paula told us about this scientific study site on Darwin finches.
The day ended with a very colorful sunset and the view of impressive landscapes all around us.
