Day 9: Santa Cruz (highlands) - Tuesday January 30th 2018
After an overnight voyage from Española to Santa Cruz we unloaded at Puerto Ayora. This is, by a long way, the largest town in the archipelago with a population of 12,000 (~70% of the population of the Galapagos Islands). From here we took a bus into the highlands - the Miconia and Scalezia sections of the humid zone. Here we were targeting several species of Darwin's Finch and Galapagos Rail. We were successful with the former, but the efforts to see the Rail bordered on farcical. We spent several hours at Cerro Puntado and then travelled to Cerro Meso where we had lunch at a restaurant by a lagoon. Our guide had forgotten his binoculars and claimed that his daughter had erased all the information from his laptop so that he did not have the rail's call as a lure, despite the fact that he regularly used his iphone and this is where the call would be stored if he had ever used it before; his main strategy for seeing the rail seemed to be to hope that one would just run across the track if we were very still, despite this being a skulking species that liked dense moist vegetation; when I had informed him how to get the rail's call from xeno-canto, he had little idea about how to utilise it and finally (the moment I really gave up on him after every effort to have faith) he told me that a bird on the edge of a lagoon was the Rail - it was a juvenile moorhen (about twice the size of a rail - leaving me wondering if he had ever seen one in his 17 years as a Galapagos naturalist guide). We did hear at least two birds at each site. (It is notable that the 7 day Sunbird/Wings tour sees this species on every trip - making it even more clear to me that our failure to do so was due to inexperience of our guide with this species; I would have preferred his honesty).
During and after lunch we saw several species around the lagoon, including a Sora (a much scarcer rail on the Galapagos Islands than Galapagos Rail), Black-necked Stilt and American Purple Gallinule. Nearby there were a number of Giant Tortoises that appeared to be in a more wild situation than those we had seen on San Cristobal.
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After lunch Alison and I walked the 1km each way to a viewpoint over a crater - we saw lots of Darwin's Finches and Galapagos Flycatchers on the way and enjoyed the view when we got there. On our return to the restaurant Rissel promptly drove us back to the crater with the rest of our companions. After that we went to another nearby highpoint from where we could see all the way to the coast.