Thursday, 12 July (Part I)
temps: 82F (28C) / 70F (21C)
We woke up early, got dressed for the day ahead, and went out to the Beagle Grill on deck 4 aft as usual. At that hour, the grill is not open, but that’s where the ‘early coffee and croissants’ are set up. Nothing elaborate; just a pitcher of coffee, hot water for tea, and a plate of fresh pastries, but it serves nicely for early birds like us. This area is also a good spot for watching the sunrise, but there was no color this morning. In fact, the day dawned overcast with a low cloud deck that gave us some interesting lines and textures.
We’re back in familiar waters; that’s Daphne Major and Daphne Menor on the horizon.
The zodiacs are being readied for the morning; and the frigate birds are back on their perch.
Although we were in familiar waters, our landings today were at new-to-us islands. This morning, we explored Las Bachas Beach on the north shore of Santa Cruz (Indefatigable to the English). In the 1950s, a couple of WWII-era barges ran aground on the beach. The locals mispronounced the word barges as bachas; hence the name by which the beach is known today.
Santa Cruz has been populated ever since settlers from Europe and the US moved here between the two world wars, but the area where we landed has no settlements. The island’s proximity to the airport on Baltra makes it a tourist hub, but we didn’t encounter any other boats this morning; I imagine it will be a different scenario when we visit Puerto Ayora on the south coast of the island in a few days’ time.
The arrow points to our morning landing location on Santa Cruz.
[map courtesy of the GalapagosIslands.com website]
As always, there were two options for this landing — a beach walk and snorkeling, or just beach time and snorkeling. We chose to do the walk and snorkel activity. We did a wet landing on a white sand beach, and then walked on a sandy trail with some lava rocks; definitely an easy walk of about 1.2 miles (1.9 km).
We land on Las Bachas Beach under grey skies with interesting cloud formations
from earlier this morning still in evidence.
Looking ahead from our landing site, and …
… looking back towards our landing site (the beach on the far side of the rocks).
Las Bachas is a major nesting site for sea turtles. Even though the breeding season is long over (November-January) and the hatchlings left the nests back in April, our naturalist rightfully kept a tight leash on us to make sure no one walked unaccompanied over the duneline where the nest sites are located.
We saw a couple of tracks made by mama turtles as they made their way between the beach and the ocean, as well as a couple of the huge indentations in the sand that mark the nest sites, but no sea turtle sightings on land. No surprise as they only come on land to lay their eggs after they mate in the winter months. But that begs the question about the presence of the fresh sea turtle tracks we saw! Perhaps these turtles are on a different cycle; should have asked David.
David draws the outline of a sea turtlE
As he explains that the oar-like flippers
make deep indentations along the
edges of the tracks. | Remnants of the WWII-era barges that
ran aground on the beach in the 1950s
poke out of the sand; don’t trip on them. |
Continuing down the beach, we didn’t see anything that was new to us, but the walk was nice nonetheless — especially since the temp was comfortable and the humidity was reasonably low.
This is a good beach to get one’s ‘fix’ of Sally Lightfoot crabs.
You can see that this marine iguana is rather small; I’m guessing it’s a juvenile.
Strutting atop the sand dunes, this great blue heron takes flight briefly to get
around bushes in his way, and then continues his walk.
I’m enchanted by the bright red eye ring of the American Oystercatcher.
There are a couple of brackish ponds behind the sand dunes of Las Bachas that are popular feeding and resting areas for greater flamingos, ducks, and migratory birds. Our hopes of seeing any flamingos up close were dashed when we saw them in flight as we neared the pond at the turnaround point of our walk.
greater flamingos are a relatively new arrival to the islands.
as such, they are still a bit fidgety around visitors.
We were resigned to having this glimpse of the five birds in flight being our only encounter with these brilliantly colored recent arrivals to the archipelago. As it turns out, though, we saw another small flock in flight as we were heading back to the landing site.
flying towards us, the flamingos come so close that …
… when they are overhead I can only get a close up of two of them.
When the flamingos disappeared behind a dune, David took us to another pond in that direction and we found the foursome busy feeding there. Three of them were on the far side of the pond, but one of them cooperated beautifully and came to feed close to our position.
I get to double my pleasure with a reflection.
greater flamingos are filter-feeders. They feed with their heads down;
their oddly shaped bill has adapted accordingly.
Although flamingos are not endemic to the island, this does not diminish our
pleasure in the encounter.
The bonus at this pond was a close-up sighting of three black-necked stilts. One of them was hobbling and walking on bended stilts; injured for real or perhaps doing the injured bird routine to draw attention away from its nest. Not endemic to the islands, this is the only one of the ten stilt species worldwide to be found in the archipelago.
With legs anywhere from 8-10 inches (20-25 cm) long, these birds fit their name.
This stilt looks like it might be sitting on its nest. After a while …
… it got up and hobbled to the edge of the pond; Note how its legs are not fully Extended.
Injured or pretending to be injured???
At this point, David called timeout; the snorkeling portion of the trip was at hand. We asked if those not snorkeling could stay behind at the pond, but he nixed that idea, suggesting that we spend our time on the beach instead. Nuts! We didn’t have to like it, but we complied and followed him back to the landing site.
