In the early hours of the day we arrived at Genovesa Island, the northeastern most island in the archipelago, which has very large colonies of seabirds. We headed ashore to the two sites opened by the Galápagos National Park: Prince Phillip’s Steps and Darwin’s Bay. In both cases we encountered several red-footed boobies nesting in the trees. There were also great frigatebirds sitting with their chicks in their nests while others were chasing boobies and gulls to steal food from them. As the day was a bit cold, we noticed Galápagos marine iguanas were still warming up until late in the day. Along the trail on Prince Phillip’s Steps we also found the top land predator on this island, the short-eared owl. The absence of Galápagos hawks here on Genovesa is a condition that the owls take advantage of and they hunt all day and all night long.
After our morning hikes we returned to the ship to go snorkeling in deep waters along the cliffs of Darwin’s Bay, which is one of two calderas in this volcano. We saw sea turtles and different types of fish. Some of our lucky guests even encountered a couple of scalloped hammerhead sharks and a rather large white-tipped reef shark.
This afternoon we went kayaking and hiking on these two wonderful sites to end a great week in the Galápagos.
