Birding in the Galapagos

We have just come back from our holiday in the Galapagos and then a cloud forest in Ecuador. Birding in the Galapagos is astonishing from many view points. The most startling thing I found in the beginning was the fact that even the small birds were totally unafraid and even when we saw them in the few towns that exist in the Galapagos. Although I expected the larger birds to be unafraid it was really odd to have the small finches and beautiful yellow warbler right next to you at any one time. From a photography point of view, it was also stunning as the birds will sit there, often motionless in perfect sunlight. I took over three thousand photographs as I went and that is after the daily deletions I was making. Thank God for digital cameras.

There actually aren't that many species of birds in the Galapagos which isn't that surprising considering that they had to get almost 1,000 km from mainland Ecuador and that's only if they were coming from there. There are 58 species of bird of which 28 are endemic. I can't say that I saw a great many of this list but I can say that almost without exception, every single bird species I did see I was able to take a definitive photo of at some point during the trip. I was using my 300mm lens which was mainly excellent for the birds despite the fact that they were often so close. I had wanted to buy a 400mm lens before the trip but Lindsey wouldn't let me. There were three other avid photographers in our group and two of them were using Cannon cameras. They both had a better body than I had with the 40D and were both using an 18-270 Tamron lens which appeared to be just the thing for the holiday. That way you could take great photos no matter how close the animals were without having to change your lens. Having said that I appreciated having that little bit extra zoom. I am starting to look much more critically both at my own photos but also at professional photography and am surprised to start seeing the flaws in the professional pictures. It seems that the quality of cameras and lenses that an amateur has access to are such that the gap between the technical quality of amateur and professional photographs is quite small and the skill lies more in the creativity and probably manipulation of the photos afterwards. I think the other photographers were taking the shots in RAW format whereas I was simply using the Large/Fine setting. If you look at my shot of the Galapagos flycatcher and imagine seeing that shot in a magazine would you really think the quality was poor? I think not. Having said that, I consider this shot probably one of my best ever photographs.

I originally bought the camera in order to take pictures in low light knowing that I would not be able to use flash to take pictures of the gorillas in Rwanda. In the Galapagos I had the opposite problem of not really knowing how to take pictures in strong sunlight. Stupidly I didn't even have a lens shade so I am sure that would have helped. The problem was exacerbated with the frigate birds. Frigate birds (both the magnificent and the great) are very large, mainly black birds which simply float in the air tantalisingly in front of your camera lens. The problem is that if they are above you even a little bit then what you end up with is basically a silhouette with a tiny bit of colour (usually the red of the deflated neck sack) just showing if you look close up. I think I took more photographs of frigate birds flying than of anything else. I would guess at least 500 and in the end did get the definitive shot complete with inflated airsack. In the Galapagos patience really does pay off, eventiually you will almost certainly get the definitive picture. The only exceptions to that were the galapagos penguin which we we only saw on one day and the flamingos which were too far away.

Probably the best day for birding and photography was the day we went to the island called Espanola. This is where the blue-footed boobies were nesting right on the path which not only was great for photography and for watching them do their courtship dances but also because they were flying in right over our heads to land on the path. The path takes you up to some cliffs where you also see masked or nasca boobies and swallow tailed gulls. Espanola also has an endemic species of mockingbird. We had heard stories of how the mockingbirds will drink from an open waterbottle. We didn't see this but they did follow you around everywhere obviously expecting something. When we got up to the cliffs we saw nesting waved albatrosses which was definitely one of the highlights for me. The chicks were the size of a large chicken and the adults more turkey sized. The wind was billowing the cliffs allowing the birds to glide along slowly through the air. Watching and photographing the albatrosses doing this was fantastic but the real treat here was probably the red-billed tropicbirds with their long white tails. My shot is not bad but on close inspection is not quite in focus. As if that wasn't good enough as we returned to the beach a galapagos hawk flew in and posed perfectly for about 5 minutes. I would say I was about 5ft from it. After seeing the albatrosses on Espanola I was lucky enough to see albatrosses on the water a number of times during the trip. This has to be one of the rarest sites and most rewarding for a birder.

There are 13 species of Darwin finch. There are a few which are easily identifiable due either to size or obvious beak shape but there are a number of intermediate finches which are pretty tricky. Whenever I could I would photgraph the finches and then when we got back onto the boat I would play the finch game which involvedtrying to identify the finches by their beak shape. The three that I was sure of were the large ground finch, the small tree finch and the cactus finch. Unfortunately we didn't see the woodpecker finch which uses a stick to ferret out grubs in trees thus taking up the woodpeckers natural evolutionary niche.

If you want to take great photos and be up close and personal to birds then the Galapagos is the place. Our last part of the trip we spent three days in a cloud-forest near Quito. That was the place for seeing diversity but more of that on my next post.