Española Island (Hood)

This entry will be full of facts and figures I am afraid ... I want to document what I have learnt about the Islands ... as well the fauna on the island we visited next in some detail.


The Galapagos Island group consists of 18 islands and 107 rocks and islets situated at the Galapagos Triple Junction - a geological area in the eastern Pacific Ocean several hundred miles west of the Galapagos Islands where three tectonic plates - the Cocos Plate, the Nazca Plate and the Pacific Plate - meet. The three plates do not meet at a simple intersection - it is complicated by the presence of two small microplates, the Galapagos Microplate and the Northern Galapagos Microplate, atop the Galapagos hot-spot, a place where the Earth's crust is being melted from below by a mantle plume, creating volcanoes. Española Island (Hood) is the oldest island, estimated to have formed between 5 million and 10 million years ago - best guess 3.5 million years ago. The youngest islands, Isabela and Fernandina, are still being formed.

The morning of Wednesday, 21st April 2010, saw us off Española Island (Hood), after a roughish night's journey.

We had anchored in Gardner Bay which possesses a lovely beach from which we snorkelled and swam. It was warm! While I did some deeper water snorkelling, Margaret rode in the ship's glass bottomed boat for a drier look at the marine life! After this exercise is was back for lunch and a siesta. In the late afternoon we had a wet landing at Punta Suarez, where we encountered both migrant and endemic wildlife, which included Marine Iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus), of which, upon his his visit to the islands, Charles Darwin wrote "the black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft), disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them 'imps of darkness'. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit." In point of fact, the marine iguana is not always black; the young have a lighter coloured dorsal stripe, and some adult specimens are grey. In adult males, their colours vary - breeding-season adult males on Española go reddish and teal-green in colour, while on Santa Cruz they turn brick red and black. Scientists have reasoned that the dark skin allows for more rapid absorption of heat - as they feed almost exclusively on marine algae, they are subject to heat dissipating cold water as they graze - 9 or so minutes is the most they can stay under water for before their body temperature chills dangerously ... even though they can do without air longer. The other challenge they have evolved a response to is the expelling the excess salt they absorb form their feeding habits. This is blown out (noisily!) from nasal glands while they bask in the sun to recover their body heat - the coating of salt can make their faces white.. They are pretty foul in toiletry habits too, while basking together! On land, the marine iguana is rather clumsy, but in the water it is a slow but graceful swimmer.

On Española landing at Punta Suarez, (we landing from the pangas), we found Lava Lizards, Mockingbirds (Hood ones if you please!), Swallow-tailed Gulls, Blue-footed Booby, Red-Footed Booby and Nazca Boobies, Red-billed tropic birds, American oyster catchers, Galápagos Hawks, some of Darwin's Finches, (more on all these in a later blog) and the Waved Albatross (Phoebastria irrorata). The island's steep cliffs serve as the perfect runways for Waved Albatross - which are a delight and captivating. They take off from the cliffs, heading for their ocean feeding grounds near the mainland of Ecuador and Peru. When they return it is fair to say they rather crash land (they have such a high stalling speed so need to come in to land rather quickly!). They get their name from their breast feathers. They have nostrils (over three-quarters of the way up their beak), which allows salt to be expressed as very salt water ... which slowly moves down and drips off the end of the beak.We were lucky enough to watch their courtship - they mate for life and when returning to breed the male arrives first and when the female arrives they check to find their mate through a complex ritual of rapid bill circling and bowing, beak clacking, and an upraised vertical bill to make a 'whoo-hoo' sound ... fabulous!