South America 2015, Part 11.

More awesome beasties from the Galapagos! But first, plants!

In keeping with the weird and rough landscape, the flora is also weird and rough.

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For example, this hibiscus-type flower with stabby leaves.

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Hairy finger trees.

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Chestnuts maybe. Or 11th century maces. I have no idea.

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A shrub made entirely of pain.

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There are prickly pear cactuses everywhere. There was one growing in the middle of street.

I guess they drive around it.

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When the cactus doesn’t have any thorns it doesn’t look too good.

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However they look terrible with their thorns and whatever that crust is so it’s a bit of a lose-lose for these cactii.

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Finches! I know they are important and they have different beaks and that shows they make the natural selections, but to me they just look miffed and surly.

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Here’s a great picture my niece took of a plump yellow bird in the foreground with finches in the background.

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We visited a tortoisium (I seriously doubt that is its real name, I came up with that). Since humans introduced rats onto the islands the tortoise eggs are at risk of being eaten, so the eggs of the various tortoii are rescued and brought here to hatch. The tortoisium was created to prevent the same fate as Lonesome George. Lonesome George was the last of his kind and could not mate with any other type of tortoise so when he died a few years back it was a sad day. His body was shipped to the Museum of Natural History in New York where he will be mounted and put on display some time in the near future.We visited where he had lived.

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When the wee toi-tois reach the size of a lunchbox they are returned to their respective islands because once they get that big they have no predators. We saw many ones almost lunchbox-sized. They looked like little old grumples.

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You can appreciate how different the types of tortoises are. There are the very round ones I saw shortly after I arrived, but there are also the saddleback ones. Their shells are flatter and they have a large lip at the front.

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Sometimes you just gotta lay with all your limbs sticking straight out.

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“Uhhh, you lookin’ at something there, Bud? You wanna start something?”

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But the best thing we saw, possibly the best thing from the whole island experience, was meeting Donatello. When we were looking at a model of a tortoise egg (fun fact: you should not rotate tortoise eggs the way you would with chicken eggs, so when they are found in their little burrows information is written on the top of the egg and that always faces up) when I asked if there were any brand new baby tortoises we could meet. The keeper said there was one, born a month ago named Donatello. We were not allowed to touch him because we might give him mainland germs but we cooed over his tiny angry cuteness. So tiny. So angry.

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In keeping with the theme of animals who look disinterested and consumed with ennui, land iguanas!

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And finally for today, flamingos! Yep, they’re there. Here are some flamingos. The brown pointy things in the foreground are foraging ducks’ butts.

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Here’s another one.

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And another one. They were sparse but all over the place if that makes sense.

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Next entry: all the sea creatures. Crabs, birds, birds who eat crabs, and penguins.

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