North Seymour & Rábida Island
The day began with strong sunshine and clear skies and stayed like that during the whole day. Right at the landing site on North Seymour Island our meeting committee included two sea lion pups that basically couldn’t care less about our presence and stayed on the dock as all of us disembarked and got our cameras ready to record the beauty of this place. Several frigate birds glided by the cliff next to us, and in the distance we could hear the sounds of a male frigate trying to get some attention from the females flying above it.
As we walked on a sandy beach several blue-footed boobies practiced their courtship dance - males whistled at the females in front of them and other males that had no companions whistled at the females flying by.
It was also our first encounter with the endemic land iguanas. The first two iguanas we saw started to feed right in front of us, and for a while we all thought that was the highlight of the morning, but the island and its land iguanas had more to offer this day. As we kept walking we saw another iguana under a cactus. It looked at the cactus with a lot of interest, and it began to try to crawl up to get a pad. Then a male frigate landed on a tree almost on the trail, not too far away, and began to do the courtship display. So it was time to make a very difficult decision: choose between an iguana trying to climb on a cactus to get a pad, or a male frigate with a fully inflated red pouch making several sounds as females flew by, which ended when one female decided to land right next to him. I could see the difficult decisions that some had to make, looking at the iguana under the cactus and then looking back at the male frigate that just gotten a female companion. The land iguana finally succeeded on the third try and reached a high cactus pad, small enough to be ripped off the cactus, and then got on the ground and began to eat it. Camera shutters sounded like sewing machines, and everyone got a nice memory, both in their cameras and in their minds.
During the afternoon as we visited the beautiful red sandy beach on Rabida Island, it was time for the nesting pelicans to show off. Several chicks nested near the beach and made clumsy movements every now and then, while the sea lions nursed on the beach. A special event was a lonely penguin we saw on a rock, not a very common encounter in this place.
As we left the red sandy beach on one side we could see the sun setting behind a volcano, and to the east we spotted the full moon. This was a great way to end the day and to get more energy for the rest of the week, with more walks on the lava fields of this unique place.
