Santa Cruz Island
Today has been a very busy day for everybody and full of highlights, but I think it is one of those days that I will personally never forget, because after we saw the tortoises in the famous Charles Darwin Research Center, I had the opportunity to go to one of the local schools and give a 45 minute talk to a group of kids that were ten to twelve years old. At the end of the talk, I gave them, as a small gift, some blue folders given to me by Lindblad Expeditions to make good use of and materials are always needed in the schools. To see their happiness and such smiling faces is something very hard to forget, and at the same time, it makes me feel very proud to work for a company that is not just involved in conservation programs but also heavily involved in the local community through scholarships, funds for local conservation actions and little details like the one that I had the chance to do this morning.
After a delicious lunch in one of the restaurants located in the highlands of Santa Cruz Island, we continued our day’s explorations by heading into the mountains in search of more giant tortoises, this time they were in the wild. We were lucky enough to find some of them in the middle of some fresh water ponds so that we all got some incredible pictures of this emblematic species.
Many of us also went to see an endemic giant scalescia cloud forest, a unique and rare Galápagos ecosystem, where some species of land birds were sighted like the colorful vermillion flycatcher and the woodpecker finch.
Today has been a very busy day for everybody and full of highlights, but I think it is one of those days that I will personally never forget, because after we saw the tortoises in the famous Charles Darwin Research Center, I had the opportunity to go to one of the local schools and give a 45 minute talk to a group of kids that were ten to twelve years old. At the end of the talk, I gave them, as a small gift, some blue folders given to me by Lindblad Expeditions to make good use of and materials are always needed in the schools. To see their happiness and such smiling faces is something very hard to forget, and at the same time, it makes me feel very proud to work for a company that is not just involved in conservation programs but also heavily involved in the local community through scholarships, funds for local conservation actions and little details like the one that I had the chance to do this morning.
After a delicious lunch in one of the restaurants located in the highlands of Santa Cruz Island, we continued our day’s explorations by heading into the mountains in search of more giant tortoises, this time they were in the wild. We were lucky enough to find some of them in the middle of some fresh water ponds so that we all got some incredible pictures of this emblematic species.
Many of us also went to see an endemic giant scalescia cloud forest, a unique and rare Galápagos ecosystem, where some species of land birds were sighted like the colorful vermillion flycatcher and the woodpecker finch.
