Meet the unique creatures of the Galápagos Islands, whose mysteries are still being revealed 180 years since Charles Darwin took his voyage of discovery there
@peter_grunert
PHOTOGRAPHS PHILIP LEE HARVEY @PhilipLeeHarvey
On the island of Isabela, a 100-year-old (so quite possibly only middleaged) giant tortoise retracts its neck into a defensive posture
‘Don’t approach the animals.’ The advice of our guide rang out as a flycatcher boldly hopped forward and plucked a few hairs from my head. We arrived on the Galápagos Islands during the hot and wet season, a time of great abundance, when land birds such as Darwin’s finches, warblers, mockingbirds and Galápagos flycatchers are on the hunt for nesting materials. Visitors wandering the national park are accompanied by an officially sanctioned naturalist, whose duties include trying to enforce a two-metre human-to-animal distance rule. The creatures often have other ideas.
Only earlier, I’d been forced to edge back as a pair of vivid yellow land iguanas slithered into battle at my feet, tails lashing angily against one another. Another time, a four-metre wide manta ray swooped up from the depths of the sea, pirouetting about my head. In my bewilderment, I gasped mouthfuls of seawater through my snorkel.
At times the locals also find it hard to avoid interaction with the wildlife. 30,000 people live on this cluster of 19 volcanic islands, set 600 miles adrift in the Pacific from the Ecuadorian mainland. Half of them inhabit Puerto Ayora on the island of Santa Cruz, working in tourism, conservation, farming and fishing. In the town’s fish market, traders intersperse commerce with batting away the Galápagos sea lions, brown pelicans and marine iguanas that queue up for scraps.
As with most visitors, my week-long tour of the archipelago was with a group travelling by boat, mostly to areas far beyond human habitation. On Fernandina, the youngest island in the Galápagos, a gang of marine iguanas as dark and gnarled as the lava rocks they basked on scuttled forwards and sneezed in our faces. This was not a hostile gesture; the sneezing is to purge themselves of excess salt absorbed on algae-foraging sorties into the ocean. Knee-high Galápagos penguins, so cute and clumsy on the shoreline, hurtled past underwater with immense violence, coralling fish into swirling balls of terror that were soon to be devoured. And amid the sun-bleached remains of sea urchins on a beach, we found a barnacle shell as big as a hand. The young naturalist and trainee clergyman Charles Darwin loved to collect these, and I wondered whether this one had crossed the oceans attached to the prow of a ship, or perhaps the head of a whale.
On Isabela, the largest of the islands, we encountered a creature that so intrigued Darwin when he stopped by here in 1835, during the five-year voyage of HMS Beagle. A giant tortoise came lumbering through the spiny undergrowth, snapping at the leaves of poison apple trees. The tortoises’ eyesight and hearing are said to be abysmal, but they grind to a halt if they sense the vibrations of a person walking nearby.