Santa Cruz Island
Today was an object lesson in the human impact on nature. Santa Cruz is one of the most populated islands in the Galápagos, and seeing the busy port, the tortoise breeding program at the Charles Darwin Research Station, and the farms up in Santa Cruz’s highlands really made you think about how people interact with their surroundings. Before people came here there were hundreds of thousands of tortoises all over the Galápagos; but then sailors killed them for food, settlers killed them for oil, and farmers not only destroyed much of their habitat but introduced species like dogs, cats, rats, and goats that eat their eggs, young, and food. One set of pictures at the Darwin Station showed Española Island both before and after the introduction of goats to the island: one picture was nearly choked with grasses and bushes, and the other (post-goats) looked mowed…
But even in today’s settled Galápagos environment the wildlife is prominent. We saw tortoises of every size, from a few inches long at the breeding station to 4-foot-long behemoths wallowing in the swamps in the highlands. They were surrounded by birds of all kinds: we saw pintails, finches, a vermillion flycatcher, a Galápagos dove, and even a short-eared owl when we stopped the buses to move a large tortoise out of the road. (Even our we-do-this-every-day naturalists were excited by the owl.)
I read a story about a guy who got shipwrecked here before the island was settled—around 1900, back when the island was called Indefatigable. He and his shipmates kept trying to get up into the highlands to find fresh water since they had been reduced to drinking sea turtle blood to survive. Looking at the island’s incredibly dense underbrush, which the tortoises make little tunnels to get around in, I completely understood why they would get about a mile inland and then just give up. (They eventually found water near the coast, and got rescued; he ended up as a New York taxi driver.)
Today was an object lesson in the human impact on nature. Santa Cruz is one of the most populated islands in the Galápagos, and seeing the busy port, the tortoise breeding program at the Charles Darwin Research Station, and the farms up in Santa Cruz’s highlands really made you think about how people interact with their surroundings. Before people came here there were hundreds of thousands of tortoises all over the Galápagos; but then sailors killed them for food, settlers killed them for oil, and farmers not only destroyed much of their habitat but introduced species like dogs, cats, rats, and goats that eat their eggs, young, and food. One set of pictures at the Darwin Station showed Española Island both before and after the introduction of goats to the island: one picture was nearly choked with grasses and bushes, and the other (post-goats) looked mowed…
But even in today’s settled Galápagos environment the wildlife is prominent. We saw tortoises of every size, from a few inches long at the breeding station to 4-foot-long behemoths wallowing in the swamps in the highlands. They were surrounded by birds of all kinds: we saw pintails, finches, a vermillion flycatcher, a Galápagos dove, and even a short-eared owl when we stopped the buses to move a large tortoise out of the road. (Even our we-do-this-every-day naturalists were excited by the owl.)
I read a story about a guy who got shipwrecked here before the island was settled—around 1900, back when the island was called Indefatigable. He and his shipmates kept trying to get up into the highlands to find fresh water since they had been reduced to drinking sea turtle blood to survive. Looking at the island’s incredibly dense underbrush, which the tortoises make little tunnels to get around in, I completely understood why they would get about a mile inland and then just give up. (They eventually found water near the coast, and got rescued; he ended up as a New York taxi driver.)
