[Beautiful waters and lovely peaceful landscapes.]

Fatima was our naturalist for this excursion and the first
place she took us was to a lagoon where flamingos spent their morning foraging
for tasty marine tidbits in the tidal waters. There used to be more flamingos
she said, but the salinity of the water was changing and they think that it
might be discouraging the food source. The fresher the water, the less marine life for the flamingos.
We passed a finch nest and stopped to look at some of the
vegetation. Fatima insisted that one of the plants had adapted to the dry
weather by making itself a waxy coat on the leaves to keep the moisture in.
Several more times along the way she gave interesting points of “adaptation” of
plants. I couldn’t understand how she could give so much credit to the plants
rather than their Creator.

The trail ended at a large beach where others were gathered
on near the water’s edge watching a large sea turtle make its way back into the
water. The sea turtle was a female checking out the shoreline for a place to
lay her eggs. According to our naturalists, the female makes several trips to
the shoreline to find a place where the sand is soft so that she can dig the
hole to lay her eggs which she does at night. The process takes a while so the
night is better to avoid the heat of the day.

The tracks of the giant sea turtles could be seen in several
places along the beach and it wasn’t difficult to see where there had been
turtle nests made in the soft sand at the top of the beach.

As we watched the turtle slowly disappear into the surf, our
attention turned to a blue colored heron perched on the rocks, a watchful eye
tuned to the water’s edge for a tasty tidbit.
Fatima led us back to the beach where some opted to snorkel
and others, like us, went back to the ship to go on what was called a deep
water dive. I hoped the water would be clearer than it had been on our first
snorkel in the Galapagos waters.
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