This is the Swallow-tailed Gull, Creagrus furcatus. It’s endemic to the Galapagos, and as you can see, with that big red eye-ring it’s one of the world’s more striking seagull species.
I use the word ’seagull’ deliberately because, for some reason, it really winds up a lot of birdwatchers; they insist that the only acceptable term [...]
Darwin’s finches tracked to reveal evolution in action : Nature News
More fascinating results from the legendary research by Peter and Rosemary Grant into Galapagos finches. If you haven't read 'The Beak of the Finch' – why not?
(del.icio.us tags: Galapagos birds evolution speciation )
Video: Atul Gawande: New Yorker Festival : The New Yorker
A very interesting talk [...]
This book was recommended to me when I was in the Galapagos; I finally got round to reading it and I’m really glad I did. It’s an account of Peter and Rosemary Grant’s long-term study to measure the effects of natural selection on finches in the Galapagos. When this book was published in 1994, the [...]
Best Plant
All those rainforest plants were nice, and I enjoyed taking wildflower photos while I was in Spain. But, not least because it’s nice to pick a winner that I can actually identify, I’m going for the Galapagos Prickly Pear, Opuntia echios. On islands where there are giant tortoises and land iguanas, they’ve evolved woody [...]
While I’m rounding up 2006.
2006 was a pretty good birding year for me, mainly because of my trip to Andalusia at Easter and Galapagos/Ecuador in the autumn. But I did get one lifer in Britain this year, which for a rather occasional, fair weather birder like me was very exciting. That was Horned Grebe (what [...]
I finally got round to uploading some photos from the Galapagos to Flickr. The whole set is here. It includes some sealions:
boobies:
and of course tourists:
Well, I’m in Quito. Annoyingly, I can’t log into my webmail for some reason – some horrible bug in IE7 perhaps.
I spent the morning looking at pre-Hispanic stuff at the museum, which I enjoyed, and then took a token look at the glories of colonial Quito before deciding I needed to sit down for a [...]