The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

Today we went to the Giant Tortoise Breeding Center to see the baby tortoises.

They have really long necks.

There was one pen that had a clutch from this month! They were still really small.

This guy hasn’t even got eating down yet.

That’s it, use your foot!

Eating is hard work. Time to rest in the shade.

Cut it out, Yurtle!

Yurtle the tortoise doesn’t even rhyme!

We also saw some of the really big ones. There was no one else around when we were there so we could sit and hear all the munching of the babies and the adults.

They have long necks too.

They also had big feet.

And big toenails.

This is an Espanola tortoise brought in from the San Diego Zoo. There were only 2 other males of his kind when they brought him in, so the breeding program was in trouble. But he is quite the lady’s man and is now the father of 80% of his subspecies.

There were also pens for the iguanas.

We saw lots of lava lizards while wandering around.

And lots of weird plants. This one looks like a fern, but it has flowers.

This is another cactus flower.

This is the inside of a dead cactus.

There was also  a wasp that followed us around. Here is an old nest:

And here he is trying to camouflage on the backpack.

This is a spider.

The birds are still quite relaxed around people. This is a mockingbird that was squawking at Matt while he was taking Kerri’s picture.

Here is a cactus finch on the ground.

And here is a ground finch on a cactus.

He flew down off of his flower to investigate us.

It kept hopping closer and closer, with pollen still all over it’s nose. Then it pecked Kerri’s toe. Hard! It moved away after Kerri jumped back. Matt was not sure what she expected but assumed a bird hops over you are likely to get pecked.

After SCUBA we hiked out to Tortuga Bay. It is a 45 minute hike. 30 minutes out to the beach, and then 15 more minutes to get to the bay. The beach was very pretty with extremely fine white sand.

It has many crabs.

And little shrimpy things in the tide pools.

And crab tracks.

This is the hole of a ghost crab. They make tiny balls of sand outside of his hole. But they disappear into their holes really fast.

There were also these tracks.

Which belong to the marine iguanas.

They do not camouflage very well in the pale sand. But they are hard to see on the lava rocks.

The bay at the end was also very pretty.

We were exhausted after SCUBA, so we tried to go to a beach where we could crash and watch the wildlife. Unfortunately we confused the “swimming” symbol on the map with the “beach” symbol. But we decided it was good enough.

There actually wasn’t much wildlife either. There are supposed to be baby sharks and rays in the lagoon, and the water was certainly clear enough to watch them, but we didn’t see any.

There weren’t even very many birds. This is ghost bird. Now you see him.

Now you don’t!

Here he is again.

This is crabby one claw.

And that’s pretty much all we saw!

Because we hadn’t been diving in a while, we started with 2 easy beginner dives in Punta Estrada and Loberia before attempting the stronger currents in the rest of the Galapagos. We saw a number of different fish. Some of the small ones were hanging out in the rocks.

The bigger ones were more out in the open.

There were many pencil urchins at these sites and something was growing on all the spines.

We saw pencil urchins growing inside a clam shell. We saw a number of clam shells but never any live clams.

There were several types of starfish. These ones had stubby arms and were a strong yellow with spikes.

Occasionally there were outgrowths on the rocks, some very delicate and white, others grew as these small fans.

We saw our very first white tipped reef shark.