Genovesa Island
Could I be allowed to use some literary license today? It is so tempting to anthropomorphize, but it is also much easier to understand the life of our surrounding creatures when we describe it as if we were describing our own lives.
So I am afraid I will talk today about Blanca, a swallow-tailed gull we met this morning. She is a female that has seen several of the Galápagos Islands, but of them all she prefers Genovesa, the northeastern most island, a pristine place in Galápagos.
Blanca’s day actually starts at night, when she leaves Genovesa and flies several miles away in search of bright and luminicent squid. Blanca is a good friend of the Polaris, and a few times we have seen her through our cabin windows. She has scared some of our guests at night, because she looks like a ghost with her white belly and underwings. No one expects to find such a bird feeding in the middle of the night, after all this is the only nocturnal gull in the world!
Blanca goes back to her island early in the morning. She has a chick a few weeks old, and she and her mate share time feeding and caring for the little one. She regurgitates food to the chick, which can find her beak in the darkness of dawn thanks to the white dot at its base and tip.
I always wonder when Blanca actually gets rest. Her island is very noisy in the day time with the 150,000 pairs of red-footed boobies and many other thousand pairs of great frigate birds and Nazca boobies. Blanca is a very busy gull, and probably a very proud gull as well. She knows that her species is the only nocturnal gull in the world, and one of the prettiest, with large eyes and beautiful red eye rings.
Could I be allowed to use some literary license today? It is so tempting to anthropomorphize, but it is also much easier to understand the life of our surrounding creatures when we describe it as if we were describing our own lives.
So I am afraid I will talk today about Blanca, a swallow-tailed gull we met this morning. She is a female that has seen several of the Galápagos Islands, but of them all she prefers Genovesa, the northeastern most island, a pristine place in Galápagos.
Blanca’s day actually starts at night, when she leaves Genovesa and flies several miles away in search of bright and luminicent squid. Blanca is a good friend of the Polaris, and a few times we have seen her through our cabin windows. She has scared some of our guests at night, because she looks like a ghost with her white belly and underwings. No one expects to find such a bird feeding in the middle of the night, after all this is the only nocturnal gull in the world!
Blanca goes back to her island early in the morning. She has a chick a few weeks old, and she and her mate share time feeding and caring for the little one. She regurgitates food to the chick, which can find her beak in the darkness of dawn thanks to the white dot at its base and tip.
I always wonder when Blanca actually gets rest. Her island is very noisy in the day time with the 150,000 pairs of red-footed boobies and many other thousand pairs of great frigate birds and Nazca boobies. Blanca is a very busy gull, and probably a very proud gull as well. She knows that her species is the only nocturnal gull in the world, and one of the prettiest, with large eyes and beautiful red eye rings.
