After an overnight journey we anchored off the harbour at Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island. The highlands of the island have a rich variety of plant life – dense forests including the local Lechos trees, orchids and mistletoe, sugar cane, cacao, coffee and bananas.
The first visit was to the Charles Darwin Research Station opened in the 1960s. This is a giant tortoise breeding centre and is very successful at hatching eggs and after several years reintroducing the Galapagos tortoises to where they have become extinct as a result of the consumption of the animal by whalers and guano collectors of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The recently hatched tortoises are allowed to mature as if they were in the wild. The finches which Darwin studied form much of the basis for his theory of evolution by natural selection, will stand on the table and stare at you.
A Galápagos Mockingbird
Young Giant Tortoise – notice the pattern on their shells.
These tortoise have a saddleback shell as they live in arid areas and are the smaller of the Giant Tortoises. The raised shell at the front allows the animal to reach higher up on plants to browse. These tortoise are at least 100 years old as the pattern on their shells is no longer clear.
The tortoise drinks through its nose.
We took lunch after a visit to a coffee and sugar cane (farm?) tourist explanation point in the forest of the highlands.
Later we witnessed Giant Tortoises eating grass and wallowing in the pools of water. The area here was strewn with lumps of lava ejected from the Cerro Crocker volcano.
These Giant Tortoise have a dome-shaped shell as they live in moister areas with plenty of lush vegetation on which to graze. The closeness of the shell protects them when negotiating dense undergrowth.
As we reflect on the day a sobering thought was that at the Darwin Centre we saw the preserved remains of the giant tortoise given the name Lonesome George. He was the last surviving member of the Pinta Island species which became extinct in 2012 at well over 100 years of age.
