Isla Santa Cruz
Awakening at dawn we found ourselves in a harbour filled with ships of all flags, shapes and colors. Magnificent wooden triple-masted sailships to the functional and tiny outboard through the island's still sleepy tracks to Charles Darwin Research Station.
The Station staff and our naturalists introduced us to the complexities and successes of ecological restoration. Through engaging storytelling the legacy of giant tortoises came alive, the waves of exotic animals and their elimination gained import and the fragile uniqueness of the Galápagos became apparent.
Our National Geographic Expedition’s team mountain-biked or bussed to a hacienda in the cooler highlands for a sumptuous roasted chicken and salsa lunch. Some of us had a lazy dip in the pool. We rested briefly.
Then a bus climb, slowly transitioning several life zones with ever more water until finally arriving in cloud forests shrouded in epiphytic ferns, mosses, lichens, orchids, fungi and arboreal bromeliads. Garua cloud mists moved about and amongst us, as we approached the rim of a spectacular layered pit crater one kilometer across. The forest structure here forming architecture of canopy, shrub, fern and ground layer. And what a canopy! Trees of Daisy! Incredible! Understory floral compositions seemed to be arranged ever so perfectly yet maintaining a wildness expression of nature’s opportunism. We saw many birds on our way about the land: Galápagos dove, Santa Cruz mocking bird, Darwin’s small ground finch, small tree finch, woodpecker finch and our first Vermillion flycatcher.
It was difficult to leave this. But the promise of wild giant tortoise made the idea reasonable. Our bus descent soon brought us to the trailhead for a collapsed lava tube. This provided an opportunity to be inside a Galápagos Island, seeing and feeling the layered structure, imaging the 1100 degree lava flow passing interval by interval, in deep geologic time raising an island emergent from the Pacific Sea. On a dark interior ledge, a barn owl watched us, amidst a slow and steady dripping from the tube’s roof.
We proceeded through plantation Cuban Cedar stands, exotic African grass fields, eventually spying a bachelor field of a half dozen giant tortoises. They were feeding on the native grasses. Our photographers got in quite close, and occasionally we’d hear the heavy exhalation of a tortoise as it withdrew its head into the carapace. The muddy track led to field after field of male tortoises, some exceeding 400 pounds. Then a most unusual sighting: A male vermillion flycatcher perching on a giant tortoise carapace. The flycatcher flitting up and down, bug in mouth!
Awakening at dawn we found ourselves in a harbour filled with ships of all flags, shapes and colors. Magnificent wooden triple-masted sailships to the functional and tiny outboard through the island's still sleepy tracks to Charles Darwin Research Station.
The Station staff and our naturalists introduced us to the complexities and successes of ecological restoration. Through engaging storytelling the legacy of giant tortoises came alive, the waves of exotic animals and their elimination gained import and the fragile uniqueness of the Galápagos became apparent.
Our National Geographic Expedition’s team mountain-biked or bussed to a hacienda in the cooler highlands for a sumptuous roasted chicken and salsa lunch. Some of us had a lazy dip in the pool. We rested briefly.
Then a bus climb, slowly transitioning several life zones with ever more water until finally arriving in cloud forests shrouded in epiphytic ferns, mosses, lichens, orchids, fungi and arboreal bromeliads. Garua cloud mists moved about and amongst us, as we approached the rim of a spectacular layered pit crater one kilometer across. The forest structure here forming architecture of canopy, shrub, fern and ground layer. And what a canopy! Trees of Daisy! Incredible! Understory floral compositions seemed to be arranged ever so perfectly yet maintaining a wildness expression of nature’s opportunism. We saw many birds on our way about the land: Galápagos dove, Santa Cruz mocking bird, Darwin’s small ground finch, small tree finch, woodpecker finch and our first Vermillion flycatcher.
It was difficult to leave this. But the promise of wild giant tortoise made the idea reasonable. Our bus descent soon brought us to the trailhead for a collapsed lava tube. This provided an opportunity to be inside a Galápagos Island, seeing and feeling the layered structure, imaging the 1100 degree lava flow passing interval by interval, in deep geologic time raising an island emergent from the Pacific Sea. On a dark interior ledge, a barn owl watched us, amidst a slow and steady dripping from the tube’s roof.
We proceeded through plantation Cuban Cedar stands, exotic African grass fields, eventually spying a bachelor field of a half dozen giant tortoises. They were feeding on the native grasses. Our photographers got in quite close, and occasionally we’d hear the heavy exhalation of a tortoise as it withdrew its head into the carapace. The muddy track led to field after field of male tortoises, some exceeding 400 pounds. Then a most unusual sighting: A male vermillion flycatcher perching on a giant tortoise carapace. The flycatcher flitting up and down, bug in mouth!
