Dragon’s Hill & Eden, Santa Cruz Island
Dragon’s Hill is located at the north-western corner of Santa Cruz, where park rangers and scientists have done an incredible job of restoring the animal that gave this place its name. Iguanas are the “Dragons of Galapagos!”
Animals such us goats, donkeys, dogs, pigs, rats and cats destroyed their habitat and ate the iguana’s eggs or hatchlings, bringing the population close to extinction. The few survivors were moved to nearby satellite islets called Venice and others to the Charles Darwin Research Station to reproduce. After dogs were removed from the area and the goats, donkeys and cats controlled, the habitat was restored, and the first iguanas came back to Dragon’s Hill in 1993.
Is was nice to see all the green vegetation and the different flowers that we can find if we have had enough rain, yet so difficult to imagine how dry and brown the island can be for most of the year. Sulphur butterflies, painted locust, monarch butterflies, spotless lady bugs, and of course our endemic carpenter bee were busy pollinating the flowers.
To add more color, greater flamingos shuffled the mud in a hyper saline lagoon, filtering the organic ooze, and even trying to reproduce.
After submerging ourselves in the waters of Guy Fawkes and Eden islets, the National Geographic Endeavour circumnavigated Daphne Major Island, where Mary and Peter Grant conducted an interesting study of Darwin’s finches.
