Tower Island
Today we arrived at Tower Island a few minutes before the sunrise. Tower, or Genovesa in Spanish, is the top of an eroded submerged volcano; to drop the anchor the National Geographic Endeavour had to maneuver to enter the main caldera. Tower Island has one of the largest colonies of red-footed boobies and it’s the sea bird’s paradise: since it’s so far away from the rest of the Galápagos Islands, it does not have Galapagos Hawks, which are the most important land predators.
In our program for the day, Prince Philips Steps and Darwin Bay were the visiting sites of the National Park; nature walks in these two places showed us red-footed boobies, frigatebirds courting, Nazca boobies nesting and lots of swallow-tailed gulls.
We returned to the ship a bit early, in order to begin navigation to the open water near the archipelago; during our navigation we came across pilot whales and a big group of common dolphins. A nice cocktail in front of the breach allowed us to photograph several bird species in flight, following our ship.
