Day 4 On The Galapagos Islands

Today we woke up and headed straight for Genovesa Island which so far is my favorite island. The first place we landed at was Prince Philip's Steps. This was a dry landing and you had to walk up a bunch of uneven steps made of crystalized lava. When we got to the top we immediately noticed a large Nazca Boobie standing by the path, as we climbed up further we started to notice other Frigate birds, Red Footed Boobies, Storm Petrals and Nazca Boobies. The sound that you heard though was most amazing because you could hear just about every single bird making a noise. For example the Nazca boobie males made a whistling sound and the females made a honking sound. Later on in the walk, we stopped at an edge of a small cliff and saw hundreds of birds flying around above our heads. We also saw a Short Eared Owl. They are very rare to see because their camouflage is so good and they are very small.

When we got back to the boat and had lunch I had time to go sit out on the panorama deck. This deck is given this name because when you sit there you can see almost 360 degrees around you. Genovesa is an old island that is slowly sinking back into the ocean, it is also an incredibly flat island. Our ship was directly in the center of the crater. When I looked around I could see almost the entire island.

I did not have any pictures other than the one I took at sunset.

The next place we went to was still on Genovesa island, it was Darwin Bay. On Darwin bay we swam in the water and spotted lots of fish that seemed to blend into the muddy brown sand color under the water. After the swim we started our walk. We notice a lot of the same kinds of birds as on Prince Philip's Steps but we also noticed other things, for example, a bull. A bull in the Galapagos is not the kind that you would normally think of. This bull is a sea lion, we call him a bull because he is male, the biggest in the group and king of the beach. When another group tries to steal the beach from him, he fights the bull from the other group. We also saw a giant hermit crab and a large skeleton of something ... probably a whale.