Photos of flora and fauna from a week in the Galápagos -- the islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, and Plazas Norte. Notes accompany photos, though the pictures themselves look better in slide-show format. Click on any photo to kickstart the slide-show. Enjoy!
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| Cactus Finch feeding |
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| Medium Ground-finch (most likely!), with courtship display |
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| Galapagos Mockingbird |
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| Marine Iguana |
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| Black-winged Stilt |
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| Whimbrel |
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| Spiny Galapagos Tree-slug -- not the official name, just a guess |
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| Fishing Lava Heron |
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| ...with his catch |
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| Galapagos Tortoise, from the Charles Darwin Research Center |
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| Prickly Pear Cactus tree -- food and shade for the endemic land tortoises |
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| Baby tortoise |
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| Smooth-billed Ani |
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| Pair of Galapagos Mockingbirds |
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| Yellow Warbler -- the Galapagos variety lacks the red streaking of the North American kind, it's the only warbler on the archipelago. |
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| Galapagos lava lizard, male displaying |
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| Lava Gull |
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| Spotted Manta? |
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| Black-winged Stilt |
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| Lava Gull |
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| Magnificent Frigatebird |
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| White-vented or Eliot's Storm-petrel |
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| Sea lion, or lobo (wolf) in Spanish -- to me, the canine name is much better. Sea-lions are the Labs of the sea. |
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| Playing with string... another couple was playing with a crab. Most are juveniles playing in a protected inlet while the "beach master" male patrols, on the lookout for Galapagos sharks. In a fight between an adult sea lion and Galapagos shark, I'd give it to the sea-lion 9 out of 10 times, said Eddy, our guide. |
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| Swallow-tailed Gull on Plazas Norte, nesting |
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| Galapagos Land Iguana |
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| No tail? No dice. This iguana obviously didn't make it. Sometimes the sea lions nip them off, or they may lose one fighting with a rival male. |
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| Cactus flower |
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| Blue-footed Booby |
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| Brown Noddy, or Noddy Tern |
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| Galapagos Shearwater, actually a member of the Puffin family |
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| Red-billed Tropic-bird |
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| Nesting Noddies |
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| Pile of Marine Iguanas -- the one in the center is not climbing; he's just hanging out like that. |
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| Limited shade, lobo and iguana share it |
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| Cactus Finch -- the ID is in the shape of the beak, it's one of the easier of Darwin's Finches to ID. |
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| Swallow-tailed gull eggshell |
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| Nursing sea lion |
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| Just off shore you could see the 10' Galapagos Sharks patrolling the bay, waiting for a hapless juvenile to wander too far out. There has been one surfer fatality in the last year (off the Island of Santa Cruz) due to the Galapagos Shark. |
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| Galapagos Dove |
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| Mockingbird with a moth |
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| Riptide warning on a popular surf beach with a Brown Pelican |
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| Endemic, the Galapagos Flycatcher |
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| Cattle Egrets |
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| Don't know what kind of crab this is, but we called it the strong-arm. Only the right claw is big (and red). |
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| Ruddy Turnstone |
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| Stilt |
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| White-cheeked pintail |
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| Snowy Egret |
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| Likely Medium Ground-finches -- it's said that "only God and Peter Grant can identify Darwin's Finches." The beak and body-sizes of some, including the medium and large, overlap. |
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| Returning to Puerto Ayora |
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| The island of Daphne Major -- famous site for evolutionary biology as the Grant team has studied the variations and observable evolution of its finches for generations, since 1971. |
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| Cactus Finch |
Complete, conservative bird list:
Red-billed Tropicbird
*Cactus Finch
*Lava Heron
Smoot-billed Ani
Great Blue Heron
Brown Pelican
Magnificent Frigatebird
Yellow Warbler
*Swallow-tailed Gull
*Galápagos Shearwater
Brown Noddy
Nazca Booby
Great Egret
Snowy Egret
Cattle Egret
Blue-footed Booby
Whimbrel
*Medium Ground-finch
White-vented Storm-petrel
Yellow-crowned Night-heron
*Galápagos Dove
*Galápagos Flycatcher
*Galápagos Hawk
*Lava Gull
White-cheeked Pintail
Ruddy Turnstone
Semipalmated Plover
Endemic species are *'d
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