Galapagos Page 4






To our great delight the New York Times acrostic puzzle yielded to us the following quote the day we returned from the Galapagos: "Let me tell you about Red-Footed Boobies. They are white with long pointy bills and pouchy necks like pelicans. Their feet are scarlet. If you come close they rise up flapping and scream and barf squid vomit on you." The quote is by Allegra Goodman, from her novel, Paradise Park.
Fortunately, nothing so dramatic marked our encounters with the various Booby species on the islands. Boobies belong to a class of birds that, like hawks and other predators, require binocular vision. They dive from a great height and plunge into the sea for their food. Therefore their eyes are located on the front of their head, so they can see what they are attacking, instead of on the sides of the head, like most birds, who need to see what is attacking them. On an eagle this makes the bird look regal and stately. On a Booby the eyes, combined with a long, down-pointed bill, give the effect of frozen, quizzical surprise, like, how did I end up with a silly name like Booby?

The Blue-footed Boobies weren’t breeding and dancing, so we missed that archetypal Galapagos moment. Only one island that we visited, Genovesa, had the precise mangrove habitat for the Red-footed Boobies. These birds perched in trees, which looked weird, as their red webbed feet weren’t made for grasping a branch. They weren’t breeding either, so behaviorally it was a bit of a bust. The Nazca Boobies, on the other hand, were well in the family way.

These stark black and white birds nest on the ground. They exhibited the typical Galapagos indifference to people, including a tendency to nest in the center of the designated tourist paths. Across a bare plain, or up against some thin brush, was a landscape of hundreds of nesting Boobies. On most nests a single bird (it could be male or female—both parents raise the young) half stood shading a chick. At one nest we saw a younger chick (they lay two eggs), pushed out by its older sibling and dying in the sun. This is the typical pattern. There are food resources for only one chick—the second chick is an insurance policy that is discarded if not needed. However in this El Nino year, which was starting to warm the local waters, none of the chicks we saw are likely to survive.