Galapagos 2008

We start Sunday morning with a visit to the Historical site of the first Galapagos Post Office

Seriously, this is a historic site.

The story goes that it was originally set up by sailors and pirates, and used an honor system, mail would be left in a barrel, and you were supposed to go by, pick up mail addressed to somewhere near where you were heading, and deliver it by hand... in return, you hoped someone would do the same for mail you left behind.

Here's Beth putting in some mail, and our chief naturalist, Pablo being silly

I spent the time taking some pictures of flowers and finches... the finches are famous for being Dawin's biggest clue, due to their abundance on the islands, and the different adaptations on each island and niche within each island... they come in tree and ground varieties, with small, large, and medium bills, to correspond with the available food sources.

After that we went snorkeling, but there aren't any pictures of that, because the underwater camera decided to be tempermental, and well, it's very difficult to fix the camera while underwater, especially because it wasn't really an underwater camera, but a regular small point and shoot digicam, inside a glorified ziplock baggie... so forget about the snorkeling for now, we'll do more in the afternoon. But you missed some nice snorkeling, along a steep drop-off, with clouds of coloreful fish, some Sea Lions, and on the way in, from the panga, some Red Billed Tropic birds nesting on the cliff, which we never saw again, but me, bitter? Pshaw.

Speaking of the Afternoon, we're still on Floreana,

On the Beach with crabs and a Frigate bird

This time, the underwater camera worked, and we got very close to and spent some quality time with 3 Green Sea Turtles

Rounded out with some sort of blenny nestled in some sea lettuce, a big ole Sea Cucumber, some urchins, and Beth.

Later that Afternoon we walked from the beach to the other side of the island, on the way we passed a salty pool with more flamingoes

And a few White Cheeked Pintail Ducks

Here are a couple High Dynamic Range Photos of the salty lake (HDR is a photo technique that combines between 3 and 7 different exposures of the same scene into one that contains an expended range of color and density values which otherwise could not be captured in one image -- it's complicated and there's fairly heavy math invovlved, so just look at the pictures.)

Way off in the distance, the Flamingos are nesting and have babies, those little white birds are baby flamingos... the pink comes from the shrimp and  crustaceans  they eat... sorry about the distance, with the 200mm lens, plus the 1.4x adapter, plus the 1.6 magnification factor of the camera body I can only get to an effective magnifiiction of 448mm and to beat that I'd have to spend about 6 grand and lugg an additional 22lbs of lens.

Here's a consolation close-up of the shoreline, ragged lava and water and some finches, flowers, and vegitation

On the other side of the island, a beautiful beach, and surprise, some crabs!

Out in the water, some turtles are waiting for nightfall to come ashore to lay their eggs, while they're waiting, the pass the time having sex... did I mention that it's all about reproduction?

Oh, and I admit it, I like the crabs, too the colors are just so spectacular

Speaking of color, here's the sunset, and Adventure Beth by the light of the setting sun