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THE GALAPAGOS
Tuesday 19th June - Wednesday 4th July 2007
Derek Scott
Any visit to the Galapagos Islands, especially one including a week’s cruising in one’s own chartered motor yacht, is guaranteed to be a wonderful experience, and this year’s tour was no exception. Our itinerary differed somewhat from earlier Birdquest tours in that we had a week on the three largest islands, Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal and Isabela, before joining our motor yacht, the Samba, for a week’s cruising amongst the outer isles. This change had been necessitated by a recent change in the national park regulations which now placed severe restrictions on the duration of cruises and number of sites that could be visited by any one vessel. If we were to see as many of the endemic birds as possible, we would have to ‘clean up’ on the main islands before taking a cruise that could concentrate on the uninhabited outer islands and their less readily accessible endemics. This arrangement worked well, and the only thing that prevented us from seeing all of the endemic birds was the recent decision by the National Park Service to prohibit landings at the two sites where the extremely rare and declining Mangrove Finch is still known to occur. In the space of two weeks, we visited all six of the larger islands and four of the smaller islands, and saw virtually all of the resident birds, mammals and reptiles, plus a good cross section of the islands’ more notable invertebrates and plant life. Our total bird list of 67 species was unexceptional (mid-summer is hardly a good time for most of the North American shorebirds that occur here in the northern winter), but we had no difficulty in finding 28 of the 29 endemic birds (only the Mangrove Finch, now out-of-bounds, eluded us), as well as ten of the eleven globally threatened species listed in the 2000 edition of BirdLife International’s Threatened Birds of the World. Highlights included the wonderful time spent amongst the Waved Albatrosses on Española, close-up views of a Galapagos Rail in the cloud forest on Santa Cruz, magical encounters with a large group of Bryde’s Whales in the Bolivar Channel, and, of course, a walk with those lumbering giants, the Galapagos Tortoises, at El Chato.
