Posted on 10/30/2003 10:36:49 AM PST by presidio9
Several million years ago, the Galápagos Islands popped, volcanically, out of the Pacific Ocean. The South American mainland being 600 miles away and nothing else nearby, each island was a tabula rasa. Various birds, lizards, sea mammals and seeds blew in and washed up. Biological colonization occurred by dumb luck. Very dumb luck, to judge by how the local critters flap, crawl and paddle up and present themselves to visiting omnivorous bipeds for examination of gustatory potential. Pirates, whalers and other nonmembers of the Sierra Club had an estimated 100,000 friendly, curious Galápagos giant tortoises for lunch.
Isolation allowed unusual life-forms to flourish. It's an experiment we all made, when we were single, with Chinese takeout left in the fridge for a year. Interesting what happens when all the ecological niches except the beer turf are empty. Charles Darwin thought so, too. Visiting the Galápagos aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin--doubtless after a heavy meal of turtle and beer--formulated his theory that if you're slow and edible, and I have a gun, the situation will evolve.
Unfortunately, now that the Beagle is decommissioned and the Galápagos are an ecological treasure, going there in style has become a problem. The best way to see the islands is as a tourist on a cruise ship. This entails an unforgivable profanation of travel--being a tourist on a cruise ship.
The cruise ship is the modern Eskimo ice floe. The old and the useless are put there to drift away. Although we're kinder (and more hypocritical) than the Eskimos. We provide the old and the useless with nine meals a day, karaoke and slot machines, and pretend not to mind when they return from Bermuda.
The curse of being a tourist is that you aren't at home. You're in the Sistine Chapel and it looks like God is saying to Adam, "Pull my finger." But the Vatican City docent doesn't get the joke. We need a sightseers' Domino's so that we can send out for tourist destinations and enjoy asking the citizens of Pisa, "What's Italian for 'plumb bob'?" in the company of our friends.
Luckily, among my own friends is a Texas couple with the Texas energy and ingenuity needed to tackle the twin downsides of a Galápagos excursion. George and Barbara (not their real names) spent a year juggling the busy schedules of 50-some pals who appreciate the works of Darwin--at least insofar as they apply to the free market. Plus we all love nature, especially when a covey of it is pointed by our bird dogs, if you know what I mean. George and Barbara then balanced the juggled schedules with the sailing dates of the M.S. Polaris, owned by that paragon organizer of exotic trips, Lindblad Expeditions.
Thus, in June 2003, we arrived in the Galápagos not as tourists but as a floating house party. We had booked the whole Polaris. A vessel that might have flown the "Geriatric Roger," the death's head and crossed defibrillators of a cruise ship, now, in effect, hoisted the happy burgee of a yacht. If our dinner seating included retirees from Ypsilanti who trade garden gnomes on eBay, we could tell the smarmy cruise director, "Throw these people overboard!"
Not that Lindblad Expeditions has smarmy cruise directors. Lindblad has naturalists with advanced degrees in wildlife biology. Each day these guides took us, by Zodiac boats, to a different Galápagos island. There they delivered informative talks on Galápagos flora and fauna, giving us important ecology lessons. But I'm not sure our bunch was getting the lessons intended. On Fernandina Island, our guide said, "The vestigial wings of the flightless cormorant evolved due to a lack of natural predators." Significant glances were exchanged among my shipmates. We're Republicans--we are natural predators. A nearby flightless cormorant spread stumpy and functionless appendages that looked to make him eligible for membership in the Feather Club for Birds.
"That's what happens to you without marketplace competition," said Barbara.
"The flightless cormorant is endemic to the Galápagos islands of Fernandina and Isabela," said our guide. ("Endemic" is wildlife biologist talk for "doesn't get out much" or "stuck here.")
"Notice how close we can get to the birds, even when they are nesting," our guide continued. "This is because they have no experience with humans, they are truly wild."
"Of course!" said a Dallas lawyer. "I should have realized that a long time ago--specifically in my junior year of college--wild equals stupid."
It was an insight that dominated shipboard sundowner gin-and-tonic chatter.
"Into the stupid blue yonder."
"Call of the stupid."
"Stupid Kingdom."
"Stupid thing, you make my heart sing, you make everything... stupid."
The Galápagos are an Ecuadorian national park as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Strict preservation of the pristine stupidity of the wilderness allowed us to experience a close communion with the animal world that you can't get even from Rover, no matter how stupid he is. The endemic waved albatross let us in on its every Dr. Phil moment. The birds mate for life, then separate. They go off alone for months at sea and return to Española Island in the Galápagos to breed. But, our guide said, before the albatross husband gets back together with his albatross wife, he rapes the other wives. There is an elaborate reconciliation with squawking and slapping of beaks ending in mutual embrace--perfect for daytime bird television. They have an egg, probably to strengthen the relationship. Then they take turns sitting on it for up to a week at a time. When Al Junior is hatched he gets as much as four and a half pounds of food regurgitated down his throat in a single feeding. By five months the chick weighs more than his parents. Feminist issues, family leave, childhood obesity--on Española we had found a place where Hillary Clinton truly could make a difference.
Speaking of objects of ridicule, there is the foolishly waddling, risibly yclept blue-footed booby. The boobies' webbed toes are as funny-colored as a UN flag. Their mating dance is a disco polka. They give each other pebbles.
Boobies share their inshore feeding waters with the noble frigate bird. The frigate birds soar and loop on vast scimitar wings and grace the sky with acrobatics. It's impossible not to admire the one and disparage the other, until it's time for work.
The boobies are skilled divers. Plunging from a hundred feet in the air into water sometimes only 18 inches deep, they harvest whole schools of fish. Then the frigate birds grab the boobies by their tails in midair and bite them and shake them until the boobies cough up their food. "Back on the ground," said our guide, "the male frigate birds have a very large red throat pouch which they puff full of air to attract..."
"Voters, I'll bet," said a woman who'd survived a political appointment in the Bush pére administration. "Observe the frigate birds," she said, "and you know everything you need to know about the Democratic presidential candidates."
"The blue-footed boobies need rebranding," said a marketing consultant from New York. "Those feet--they're a skateboard sneaker franchise crying out for a licensing deal."
"Look," said our guide, "a lava gull." He pointed to a bird that was more like a dove than the airborne sanitation engineer we call a gull. "They're very rare," said the guide, "maybe only 400 pairs in the world."
"They must be delicious," said one of our more avid bird-hunters. Our shipboard party was of the opinion that extinction may have as much to do with flavor as with pollution or climate change. Whenever a new creature was spotted, our first question was, "How do they taste?"
It took all week to get one of our guides to admit that he knew how giant tortoise tastes. Not personally, of course, but he was born in the Galápagos and "a long, long time ago my parents had some."
"Well?" we asked.
"Good."
The food on the Polaris was good, too, albeit lacking in turtle chops and breast of lava gull. The crew was jolly. The cabins were not too boat-sized. And every night the Lindblad guides delivered further informative talks on Galápagos flora and fauna, giving us more important ecology lessons.
Although some of us preferred to spend the evenings on the fantail in consultation with Professor Dewar's and Dr. Monte Cristo. Inside, a Lindblad guide was explaining how young the Galápagos Islands are, in geological time. Outside, George was suggesting that setting our watches to geological time could lessen stress and keep us young. "I'll get back to you on that right away--in geological time."
Mornings we snorkled--an abrupt and effective hangover cure. Commercial fishing is banned in the Galápagos. The island waters are fish Calcutta. So many giant king angelfish appeared that I felt like the bubbling deep-sea diver in the aquarium of a pet store that just can't make a sale. Tiny, silver pizza-toppers swam in schools the size of Little Italy. Parrot fish, damselfish and wrasses exhibited the same obliviousness to our presence as the waved albatross. Mercifully, so did the white-tip reef sharks. Manta rays in watery flight winged by and had a look, as did "gringo fish," so-called by the locals because they're pale in the water and turn bright-red in the sun.
Back in the Zodiac (and rather pink ourselves) our guide told us, "You'll notice the puffer fish is particularly friendly--because it is poisonous."
"Typical," said a Houston hostess who has to endure a lot of political fund-raisers.
Young sea lions came out and dove with us. They did barrel rolls around our torsos, nibbled our swim fins and played tug-o'-war with the Zodiac's lifesaver ring. They are aqua-puppies. On the lava shore of Santiago Island we saw a little fellow who'd just been born. Like a well-bred American Kennel Club dam, his mother allowed us an up-close look. No one asked, "How do they taste?"
At that evening's fantail colloquium, fly-casters asked bird-hunters, "Is there a reason we couldn't train sea lions to flush bonefish in the Florida Keys?"
The adult male sea lions, the bulls, wouldn't be much use. They spend their lives guarding a particular stretch of beach from sea lion pool boys, sea lion UPS drivers, etc. Meanwhile their wives come and go as they please. "I tell my clients," said the Dallas lawyer, "just give her the house."
Not that our tour group meant to introduce collars and kennels or animal divorce courts into the Galápagos. There's been enough disturbance of nature's balance. Feral goats, let loose by settlers from the mainland, ate the giant tortoise habitat. On the smaller islands the goats have now cashed in their 401(k)s, but Isabela still has tens of thousands. The Charles Darwin Foundation, the World Wide Fund for Nature and other organizations are spending millions on goat eradication. We volunteered to do it for free. Well, not exactly for free. But give us the goat-hunting rights and we'd sell trips to the Galápagos to wealthy American sportsmen offering unlimited trophy goat opportunities. The Lindblad people looked dubious.
The Galápagos Islands do need assistance, however. The government of Ecuador does its best but is hampered by being, frankly, the government of Ecuador. Send lawyers, guns and money. Actually, our group had the lawyers and guns covered. Send just the money to donations@darwinfoundation.org. Think of those giant tortoises. They date back to the age of the dinosaurs. They have movie-star good looks (E.T. was a huge hit). And there's something about the giant tortoises that's just so...so... "Extinctable," said Barbara. "When life-forms with more on the ball than dinosaurs arrived, they thought, 'It comes in its own casserole dish!'"
On Santa Cruz Island we saw a few tortoises in the wild. They're easy enough to find, being in exactly the same place they were when the last Lindblad tour came through. Top speed is approximately zero. And we saw a turtle herd at the Charles Darwin Research Station, where a tortoise dating service is attempting to reestablish various subspecies and repopulate the Galápagos. According to my Bradt Galápagos Wildlife book, "When hormonal levels are running high, male tortoises have even been known to try mounting rocks..."
"Ugggh, men!" said the women in our group.
"Mating is very vigorous," said the Research Station biologist. He pointed to the last male of the Pinta subspecies. "We knew that this one was sexually dysfunctional when he copulated for only 20 minutes."
"Ooooo, turtles!" said the women.
And then there is the pure beauty of nature in the Galápagos. One afternoon, steaming between islands, we encountered a pod of a thousand dolphins, jumping in undulations, Baryshnikoving above the waves. Even the Buchanan Republicans among us held their breath in awe and thereby briefly honored the Kyoto Protocol.
Out beyond the dolphins was a basking sperm whale, such a magnificent creature that, we all concurred, harming it would be as bad as seeing a SAVE THE WHALES bumper sticker on your congressman's car.
"This trip really is educational," said the Dallas lawyer. "Suddenly I want to read Moby-Dick, and not the CliffsNotes, either."
"And 40 years after the fact, I finally understand my Statistics class," said George. He was referring to the penguins and flamingos we'd seen the previous day. We had been told that this is the only place on earth that has both. The Galápagos are on the equator, so they're tropical, but the icy Humboldt Current cools the air, forming a dense, foggy mist called the garúa that gets everything soaking wet even though the Galápagos are desert islands. The climate is perfect--if you average it. Getting average confused with median, as we all did in Statistics class, penguins and flamingos both arrived.
I think we were also supposed to be learning something from the famous Darwin's finches. But, to tell the truth, they're small, drab and boring. It is a mark of Darwin's genius that he noticed them at all. Then, by observing the various evolutionary modifications in their little beaks, Darwin somehow discovered that men are descended from monkeys, although he would have known that already if he'd asked the men's wives.
Which goes to show that not all lessons in ecology are edifying. The marine iguana, for example. Washing ashore from the mainland, it learned to go with the flow. It became the only seagoing lizard. It eats almost nothing but algae. Here is the lizard version of moving to Humboldt County, California, growing your own vegetables and weaving your clothes from hemp. Marine iguanas are as dull as folk songs and as ugly as unglazed pottery. They spend all day laying on top of each other in big iguana group gropes.
Looking at the marine iguanas, the Dallas lawyer said to his wife, "Honey, do you think we should have left the teenagers home by themselves?"
You forgot male turtle hormonal levels that cause them to mate with rocks, and albatross's that rape other people's wives. Yep, sounds familiar.
BWAHAHA!
Senior moment. Too much on my mind and not enough mind to hold it all up.
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