The next day we made two stops at San Cristobel Island. The first stop was an early start with a walk at 6.30 in the morning. The ships are allocated dates and times when they can visit places to ensure the islands are not over visited.
Our walk was to find the red-footed booby which only lives on a couple of the islands. San Cristobel is one of the oldest islands in the Galapagos and our path was among the rocks.
We found several red-footed boobies including a fluffy white one on its nest in the bushes.
A pair of the red-footed boobies were sharing sticks on their nest.
There were some blue-footed boobies as well and a Nazca booby. There were several finches and more frigate birds flying around.
We came back to the ship for breakfast and collected our gear for deep-water snorkelling. We saw brightly coloured fish, a sea turtle, and a ray – sea lions swam around us.
We saw a goat on the cliff while we were snorkelling. Goats were introduced onto the islands by sailors, hoping they could use them as fresh food next time they visited. Unfortunately, they have now become a pest and there are regular culls of them.
In the afternoon we went to the Cerro Colorado Tortoise Reserve in the highlands of San Cristobel. The reserve is breeding giant tortoises and releasing them back into the wild onto the island they originally came from.
The population of giant tortoises was almost completely destroyed as the ships used to take tortoises for food. The tortoises would last for months on board without food or water so were easy to maintain. If the ship got into trouble, the tortoises were just jettisoned overboard. There are now 11 species of giant tortoise, down from the original 15, but their numbers are recovering due to the breeding program.
The sanctuary has tortoises wandering around in semi-captivity as well as those growing up. These tortoises were saddlebacks. They have long necks and when fighting each other, extend their necks and the longest neck is the winner!
We saw lots of yellow warblers.
A feral cat came near and the warblers flew to the tree tops making a huge noise. There was a mocking bird around but it was hard to see.
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Nannie RaRa 