Landlocked Quito and Otovalo, high in Ecuador's alteplano, are home to many indigenous people.

The islands of Bartolome, Española and Genovesa, also in Ecuador, are significantly less populated.

By humans, that is.

All these places are part of a memorable journey to the Galapagos Islands.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

Representing concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of deserts.

And by The Stonewall Foundation.

The desert islands called the Galapagos are to Ecuador what the lush Hawaiian Islands are to the United States.

It's a province just as Hawaii is a state.

Both of them were borne of violent volcanic activity, both are important tourist attractions and of great economic value as well.

But while the native wildlife of Hawaii has been largely depleted, that of the Galapagos is still mostly intact.

It's easy to get to Hawaii from almost anywhere.

All flights to the Galapagos must stop in Quito first.

At 9,000 feet, Quito is cold and damp as is most of the alteplano where the majority of Ecuadorians live.

Many dwell in small villages where modern technology is beyond their means.

The Republic of Ecuador is well named, after the equator that passes through much of the country.

This particular monument was put here to commemorate the equator and world peace.

Unfortunately, according to my GPS, we're about a hundred yards or so south of the equator.

We're being led by the villagers and the GPS, I'm not sure which, to the "real" equator.

The south latitude number is dropping even as we walk.

And here I have zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, where this GPS says the true equator is.

I doubt there'll be roads like this on the Galapagos.

They're mostly unpopulated.

While we await our flight to see the bountiful wildlife on the islands, we squeeze in times to see the indigenous side of Ecuadorian life.

This is the market of Otovalo.

It's a couple hours drive north of Quito, the capitol and it's known throughout the world for its market.

This is made from the alpaca fur, which is very fine, and is an important source of warmth for the cold, high Andes.

We, as indigenous people, have many customs and traditions.

Our necklaces are for adornment and are worn by young and old alike.

We speak Quechua and Spanish.

One of the oddities in Otovalo is the presence of Panama hats.

Panama hats are not from Panama, they're from Ecuador and they are great.

Bueno.

Busco un sombrero pero mi, no para señora.

One great thing about Ecuador is that their official currency is the dollar.

So I can pay this in the same dollars as I got from an ATM in the United States and they're quite happy to have it.

Trenta.

Thank you.

Gracias, señora.

Muchisemas gracias.

These are all jungle animals.

I see a sloth on here.

I see an armadillo and various exotic birds.

Ecuador is widely known for its Indian cultures.

The high, cold Andes.

Woolen goods and the alteplano.

But I'm a desert rat and what really appeals to me is some desert islands way to the west, the Galapagos.

Lying 600 miles off the west coast of Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands are the best place in the world to see wildlife up close.

Many of the same species that inspired Charles Darwin in 1835 with their tameness and uncanny variety still make these desert islands their home and they're just as approachable.

This guy's face looks just like E.T.

out of the movie.

It was the inspiration of Steven Spielberg.

The Ecuadorian government requires tourists like me and my ecologist friend Yar Petryszyn to pay a steep entrance fee.

That money goes for conservation and for infrastructure that we are happy they put to use on the island of Bartolome.

It was very nice of the National Park Service of Ecuador to build this stairway to enable us to get up and get the big picture up here of what's going on.

Oh, yes.

Otherwise it would be very hard.

Because before we didn't have this so only the strongest people can get to the top of this place.

The Galapagos Islands were borne of fire and brimstone from the sea.

Volcanologists, the people who describe them, developed their own special vocabulary.

One of their terms describes this, a splatter cone.

Volcanics in the islands isn't just one event.

There's a whole series of events.

Lava flows, cinder cones and splatter cones.

You get fissures where magma wells up and breaches in certain places and you get this molten globby material and it just splatters almost like a 4th of July fountain.

And it's real sticky and splatters over to the side and eventually builds up this cone.

And then the magma dissipates and the residual is a series of cones, usually kind of in a line following the fissure and there could be three or four in that line.

The youngest islands in the Galapagos are on the west side.

That's where the mantel plumes, magma is upwelling and forming volcanoes.

Since they're on a oceanic plate that is moving to the east, it ends up that the older islands are in the southeast part of the complex of the Galapagos Islands.

Volcanic islands are built of rough lava.

Finding a landing place can be tricky indeed.

Our guide, Harry Jiménez, is from the Galapagos and knows all the islands and how to get on them.

They are giving us the welcome to Española Island.

They really love to surf, right here.

So they actually play in the wave itself, right?

That seems like a good idea to me.

You can really notice that the eyes are much bigger than your normal gull.

Yeah, because these birds are nocturnal so they eat at night.

And the red iron plays a very important role in their life because this, at night when it's dark when they're in the open ocean, attracts the squids.

So the main diet for these birds are squids.

So this is one of the nesting areas of Española Island of marine iguanas, which is very close to the trail where we are passing by.

Marine iguanas lay eggs that are reptile.

Typically they'll protect the nest for about a week and chase other ones away, other iguanas.

And after a week then they leave never to see their young again.

And after an incubation of about three months the youngsters hatch and dig their way out and you've got a new iguana.

The Galapagos Hawk mates for life.

And that's unusual for these hawks because on the other islands, the female's polyandry, which means that she'll take on a couple of males.

This is the waved albatross.

It only nests on Española Island.

It's a very large bird and not particularly afraid of me or anybody else.

It's called waved albatross because the feather pattern on its breast is this wavy pattern.

And there's 12,000 pairs that occur in the whole world and all of them nest on this island.

Now it just jumped one of the birds.

There's one that just took off.

Yeah, because they are very heavy.

So it's the largest bird in the Galapagos and the heaviest one so they need big wings to lift their bodies in the air.

It's like a glider that we have at home.

Hang glider.

An airplane glider.

The swallow tailed gull and the waved albatross of Española Island mate for life, unlike many human beings.

Their fidelity is similar to that of the Old Faithful of Española, the blow hole.

When the ocean's rough, it reaches over a hundred feet high and can be quite intimidating if you're close by.

We don't have a lot of rain here because we don't have a lot of vegetation here, around ten inches every year in areas or islands like here.

There's enough goodies here.

This is a, yeah, verdolaga.

It's a native pursling.

It has just the right amount of salt.

So you could have here an Española Island salad without having to add any salt, maybe even any dressing.

There's no need to starve here on Española Island, if you're a complete vegetarian.

It's interesting that you have three species of boobies nesting here on the Galapagos.

The red-footed booby forages further out, anywhere from 60 miles to 100 miles if they have to.

The Nasca booby is kind of intermediate in distance where the blue-footed booby forages just off shore.

So they're partitioning that food resource into distance from their nesting sites.

A Nasca booby, it doesn't have blue feet the way its cousin does.

It's just as mellow as the blue-footed booby.

It has the black and white very clearly here on the back, it's just quite indifferent to my presence.

Well, this island of Española is all basalt.

It's real dark black rock with a lot of iron.

But here we have a white sand beach.

We have a lot of white coral and we have barnacles and shells.

So all of this with waves breaking and the fish.

Like for example parrot fish they love to eat the white coral and then they eat this and then digest and then it's coming out this very thin material.

It's very fine.

So this isn't rock material there at all.

It's organic shell, coral and things like that ground up.

You know, the Ecuadorians they feel very proud of this place because it's like the symbol, the attraction of not only Ecuador's, the attraction also of South America.

To me it's everything.

This is my world.

This is my world.

This is my life.

This is my home, Galapagos.

Only a few islands are home to humans but all are home to strange birds and their even stranger behavior.

Most of the islands lie south of the equator, unlike our next stop, Genovesa.

Genovesa Island is called the capitol of the birds.

Ah ha.

Okay, up we go.

Pretty steep, huh?

Yes.

Boy, this lava on Genovesa is really broken up.

Probably some of this breakup is due to the shrinkage and of course with fracture and everything.

But it looks like these burseras, these trees here are having an affect as well.

Yes.

It looks like they are coming through the lava.

Although some of these plants and trees have very acid roots strong enough to dissolve this hard lava and use the minerals as nutrients for themselves.

Besides that, the birds, like right there, produce a high quantity of guano and that is a good fertilizer for the plants.

The characteristic of the frigate birds, they are glider birds, they have long wings, about six, seven feet across.

And they have very pointed, narrow wings.

That helps them to glide in that way so they will be saving energies, you know, just gliding, like floating in the air waiting for some other birds that will come from the ocean with food and then they will steal them.

Males develop this red balloon during the mating season.

That's the attraction for the females.

Normally the males are like in groups, you know, like four or five.

That makes easier for the females to choose one male.

Occasionally this gular sack, which is what this inflated thing is called, gets punctured either through fighting or through accident and that puts an end to the mating display of the bird.

Perhaps only temporarily but certainly for that season.

These frigate bird they have very tiny feet so they are not nesting in the ground, they are nesting on the bushes or trees.

And they both build the nest.

Nasca booby is a new name that they got because before we used to call them masked boobies because around their face is like mask.

On most of the islands are Nasca boobies.

You, my friend, are you not ashamed that come election day you never bother to vote more than once.

That's the indifferent apathetic voter.

Red-footed boobies, those birds are pelagic birds, that means they are going very, very far out over the ocean, 40 or more nautical miles outside of the coast to fish.

So we find them in the outside islands.

Just to have an idea, here on Genovesa Islands are nesting around 140,000 pairs of red-footed boobies.

All of these birds, the red-footed boobies, have web feet like a duck and also they are the smallest booby in the family.

That's why it's easy for them to take off, not like the Nasca boobies where they prefer to cleave and always against the wind because they are much heavier.

The little birds that we see flying around over here that looks like bats, these are called storm petrol.

The name petrol came from Peter because when you are fishing in the water trying to get the little larvaes by the surface, they're making like two or three steps, catching something and fly.

You know like Peter when he was with Jesus, he told him that he can walk on the water and he made like two or three steps and then he sank.

These birds, they don't want to sink.

Harry, what are the top three or four things that tourists, those thousands of tourists, come to the Galapagos to see?

One of the symbol of the Galapagos are the giant tortoises.

That's why the name of the islands.

And also right now is very, very popular for diving.

[music] This area right through here is a good area to possibly see the Galapagos fur sea lion, sometimes called fur seal but it's really a sea lion.

Notice the real long whiskers.

Those whiskers are pressure sensitive and so when they dive down 100 or 200 feet, it's pretty dark there and they can sense the pressure caused by fish actually swimming.

So it helps in their foraging at depth.

The Galapagos Island called Genovesa is uninhabited, and that's with good reason.

The shores are almost completely lined with steep lava cliffs, almost impossible to climb.

But once you can get into the interior, it's very dry and hot and covered with just straggly vegetation.

Look at the cactus right here.

Oh, this is a prickly pear but understand that this is a prickly pear that the spines on it are really soft.

This is because on this island these cactus don't have enemies like on some other islands like giant tortoises or land iguanas that prey on the cactus.

So they don't need any protection.

Ah, look at this.

I can just rub.

You wouldn't dare do this with a regular normal prickly pear because these would be really stiff and poke you and those little stickers would be all over you.

But that feels just like a brush haircut.

Mangroves are specialized trees that can stand being in water at least part of the time and so at high tide the water actually comes in here and the roots are submerged and they're able to tolerate it by handling that, the salt in numerous ways.

Oh, look, there's one of the seed pods from the red mangrove.

And this is one of the few plants or trees that the seeds are already germinating.

Yeah, ready to go.

So this will drop off and it can float away to be planted somewhere else or maybe stick into the mud and start a new plant from that.

And look at the red-footed booby right here.

Oh, I know.

Yeah, you don't even notice them.

They're just kind of hidden in there.

I didn't even see it 'til I kind of moved the branches and there it is.

The head of that one looks like an afro on the head.

Yeah, like a little white fuzz ball with a little black beak coming out.

They're quite cute.

And then they loose that down and they're a juvenile like this.

This looks like nothing more than a garden of delights with enormous red fruits waiting to be plucked.

The problem is the birds might take a dim view of that.

Pat said, "Talk about a singles club.

These guy's got it made.

Well, they have a lot of competition among the boys.

If it's a fraternity and there's just a couple young ladies on campus, they're sure competing for attention.

You take my breath away, honey.

All the female birds just circle around overhead just waiting to come down and tease.

[bird noises] My ecologist friend Alberto Burquez has only known the islands through the writings of the likes of Charles Darwin.

Alberto has studied the Sonoran Desert for decades but has waited all his life to come to the Galapagos.

The word equator brings to mind lush forests.

However, in the Galapagos we have extremely arid systems, something we can call desert.

These deserts are created by many factors.

Among them the cold currents coming from Antarctica, the shallow effects of the mountains that cast a rain shadow on the other islands, the wind patterns and also the surfaces, the lava surfaces that preclude the infiltration of water into the soil.

Finding deserts along the equator is very rare.

The Galapagos Islands is one of the rare examples of deserts along this equatorial imaginary line.

The fearless wildlife and the tortured landscapes of the Galapagos Islands fascinate us just as they fascinated Charles Darwin.

The place is largely desert and its wonders continue to unfold every day.

The international tourists who flock here will testify that this remote part of Ecuador is unlike anyplace in the world.

On almost any desert island you'd expect to find huge cacti, leafless trees and sandy beaches.

But in the Galapagos Islands you'll also find flamingoes, sea lions and boobies, the blue-footed kind.

Next time on the Desert Speaks.

So the tradition here is that this rock itself is not just any rock but it marks the equator but it also represents a map more or less of the region with the fissures in the rock being the rivers and the canyons that surround the village.

So it has quite a history to it.

It means a lot historically, time immemorial to this indigenous community.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

Representing concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of deserts.

And by The Stonewall Foundation.

Copies of the Desert Speaks are available from KUAT.

Please mention the episode number when ordering.

For more information visit the Desert Speaks online at this address.