Espanola Island
To think that one has been in the Galápagos long enough to have seen everything or almost everything (trying to be conservative), puts one in a completely wrong place— a believer of incorrect statements. Today once again the islands showed me how different events could occur on a regular basis, when no one expects them to happen, depending on the prevailing environmental conditions.
It was just at the landing place on Punta Suarez where, following the course of nature, a sea lion was dead upon the rocks— nothing incredible about that, since all living creatures die— yet the surprising thing was to find at least a dozen large cactus finches, as well as some small ground finches, actively tearing small pieces of flesh off the corpse. Now, what we really have here is a demonstration of how a species has modified its behavior when facing shortages of food or simply when the opportunities for this to happen are present.
We were just thinking about what we had seen, when another small group of finches appeared from behind the salt bushes, competing for the remains of a sea lion’s placenta. It was a finch feeding frenzy! Not something one can see every day, not even here in the Galápagos. We all would have felt satisfied with what we had seen so far seen, but the island was still ready to give us more, so we enjoyed the hawks that perched on rocks nearby us. Later on, we had a magnificent display of albatross chicks and still we went for more and we were not disappointed. At the albatross port (the place where these birds take off) several of these huge birds caught the winds in such a way that we were almost flying with them.
Red-billed tropic birds put a lot of color in the sky, and ice plants created a chromatic carnival on top of the basaltic rocks. Our senses were exalted, and by 10:30 in the morning the sun’s heat began to show its power. We were not caught unaware; our program had warned us about exactly what was coming and we liked it. We looked forward to the afternoon snorkeling and the chance to make contact with a different reality of the Galápagos… the ocean.
