Santa Cruz Island
Today was a good tortoise day, a good bird watching day and a wonderful day for learning how people live in the Galápagos. There aren’t many places in the world with giant tortoises; actually only the island of Aldabra, in the Indian Ocean, and the Galápagos Islands have wild populations of giant tortoises. Within the Galápagos there aren’t many places where we can encounter these creatures, as most of them live in inaccessible areas like the calderas of huge volcanoes in the western islands, or tiny lava islands that are not visitor sites. So we took advantage of Santa Cruz, and we saw tortoises both in the wild and in the Charles Darwin Research Station. We saw the subspecies of this, the second largest island in the Galápagos, and many subspecies that are being bred in captivity in order to restore their populations in the wild.
After an amazingly good lunch in the home of a couple of “galápagenians,” we traveled further up to look for birds in the giant Scalesia forest. New species of birds were found, like the vermillion flycatcher and the rare and famous woodpecker finch. Several tortoises were spotted in the wild, eating guavas and grasses from the rich soils of the highlands. When we came back to Polaris we still had some more amusement, with musicians from town accompanied by great lady dancers wearing wonderful hand painted dresses. It was another fantastic day!
Today was a good tortoise day, a good bird watching day and a wonderful day for learning how people live in the Galápagos. There aren’t many places in the world with giant tortoises; actually only the island of Aldabra, in the Indian Ocean, and the Galápagos Islands have wild populations of giant tortoises. Within the Galápagos there aren’t many places where we can encounter these creatures, as most of them live in inaccessible areas like the calderas of huge volcanoes in the western islands, or tiny lava islands that are not visitor sites. So we took advantage of Santa Cruz, and we saw tortoises both in the wild and in the Charles Darwin Research Station. We saw the subspecies of this, the second largest island in the Galápagos, and many subspecies that are being bred in captivity in order to restore their populations in the wild.
After an amazingly good lunch in the home of a couple of “galápagenians,” we traveled further up to look for birds in the giant Scalesia forest. New species of birds were found, like the vermillion flycatcher and the rare and famous woodpecker finch. Several tortoises were spotted in the wild, eating guavas and grasses from the rich soils of the highlands. When we came back to Polaris we still had some more amusement, with musicians from town accompanied by great lady dancers wearing wonderful hand painted dresses. It was another fantastic day!
