Santiago Island
Today we spent our entire day visiting the island of Santiago. A dramatic island of many colors and habitats, Santiago Island shows evidence of having had volcanic activity in its recent past as demonstrated by the long stretches of black basalt lava cliffs along the coast. Being the fourth largest of the Galápagos Islands, Santiago has a lush and green highland region and sources of fresh water inland, the reason why this island was used by some of the very first human (and some non-human) visitors to Galápagos.
We started our morning by landing before breakfast at Espumilla Beach, one of the archipelago’s most important marine turtle nesting areas. Just while we were landing we spotted a group of blue footed boobies diving for fish like torpedoes entering the water, and on the mangroves we encounter four hawks, an adult and three young ones, that were calling each other back and forth. We stayed there for several minutes, delighted by the hawk’s behavior. One left a rodent he was eating to approach our video chronicler with a naïf curiosity that few animals show. Once everyone had enough pictures of the hawks we continue with the trail behind the mangroves, where a small brackish lagoon is hidden that occasionally has some lagoon birds such as black necked stilts and pintail ducks. This time the lagoon was totally dry but we saw hundreds of fiddler crabs and ghost crabs popping up from their holes. A loop trail took us inland over stony terrain and under very old button mangroves and Palo Santo trees (incense trees), to reach the top of the trail. From the top, we could see one of the few mature Palo Santo Forests left on the Island, after the eradication of goats, donkeys, and feral pigs, years ago.
Once we returned to the ship and after breakfast, we spent our time exploring by Zodiac and doing a deep water snorkel at the historical and scenic Buccaneer Cove. This one-time pirate haunt was also the area where Charles Darwin landed for his longest stint on land in the Galápagos.
In the afternoon, we navigated a short distance during lunch time to anchor at Puerto Egas, where we landed for a lovely walk of about 1.5 miles to an indented shoreline. The area had many coastal birds, and we saw many marine iguanas, female sea lions with their pups, adults males barking in the shoreline, and some Galápagos fur seals with their beautiful dense and shiny fur.
Today we learned about the natural history of the island but also about some of the most successful conservation projects on the islands, the eradication of goats and pigs, thanks in big part to donations from our guests and the efforts of many entities on Galápagos.
