After an overnight journey 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 lechoso trees, orchids and mistletoe, sugar cane, cacao, coffee and bananas.
The first visit was to the Charles Darwin Research Station opened in the 1960s. The centre is a Giant Tortoise breeding centre and is very successful at hatching eggs. The recently hatched tortoises are allowed to mature as if they were in the wild. After several years the different species are reintroduced to their home islands where the population had fallen or became extinct as a result of the consumption of the animal by whalers and guano collectors of the 16th and 17th centuries. 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.
Galápagos Mockingbird
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.
We took lunch after a visit to a sugar cane farm and coffee and cocoa plantation – a tourist explanation point in the forest of the highlands.
Green cocoa beans are unripe and turn red as they ripen.
The people at the plantation called this a microphone flower.
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. The shells have patterns on them but slowly fade as the tortoise grows bigger and almost disappears by the time they reach 100 years old.
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.
