The morning is warm, the sun is shining, and tons of sea birds are gliding in the sky in search of an early breakfast. It is the last day of a wonderful week of exploring the archipelago. Today we are anchored on a perfect rounded bay, which is an old crater formed four millions years ago.
Before breakfast some of our intrepid guests went kayaking along the bay where they saw sea birds and fur sea lions. The bay was very calm and the kayakers enjoyed this activity. Later we disembarked on Darwin beach and walked along the coast looking for the famous red footed boobies. We found many of them on the top of incense trees or red mangroves. Some of them were nesting and others were feeding their tiny babies. Also this place has a very important colony of frigates, but now is not the breeding season, so they are just chasing sea birds to take their food. They are scavenger birds adapted to grab a booby by its tail, shake it, and make it to regurgitate its food. Frigates also chase boobies when they are collecting nesting material and steal it. This is why they are attributed the special name to their behaviour called “kleptoparasitism”
Later we returned to the National Geographic Islander, suited up and went to snorkel along a cliff. The water was a bit murky because of the amount of phytoplankton, but there was still plenty to see. Some of our guests even saw hammer head sharks.
Many other multicolour fish were spotted such as parrots, Moorish idols, wrasses, Mexican hog fish and some sea stars attached to the wall of the cliff.
In the afternoon we had a second round of kayakers exploring the magnificent bay of this volcano and afterward we took a beautiful walk on Prince Phillip’s steps. It is located at the southwest portion of the island. It is a magical place where one can find many types of sea birds- Nazca boobies nesting (some nests had 1 or 2 eggs) the frigates, the red billed tropic birds, the doves, sea gulls, thousands of storm petrels, and something unique to Genovesa island is the diurnal short eared owl, which is the top predator here because the absence of hawks.
We found several of them, but the highlight was an owl that was right at the trail right at sunset and we got a great pictures with the golden light of the day.
It has been a great week with a group of great people, so enthusiastic and energetic, willing to have fun and experience all the activities offered of them. Thanks for joining us in this amazing paradise!
