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.

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.

When Charles Darwin arrived in the Galapagos Islands in 1835, he wasn't looking for anything in particular.

It's different for me.

After all, I grew up in a desert and live here.

What could be more logical for me in these desert islands than to search for large cacti.

The Galapagos Islands straddle the equator 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador.

The combination of atmospheric conditions and ocean currents make the islands mostly desert.

That's fine for me and my ecologists friends from the Sonoran Desert and for our Galapagan naturalist.

To get on to most of the islands visitors have to get their feet wet.

Oh, a beautiful reddish sand beach here.

Boy, it's a completely different color, which means it comes from different origin than we saw yesterday.

Well, this is more the oxidized basalt probably.

It's weathered.

It's just weathered.

Yeah.

So you've got a lot of iron oxide here but what a beautiful beach.

The vegetation is completely different.

It's much richer here than.

Gracias.

Okay.

Life jackets off.

It's odd to wake up in the morning with the temperature outside just about the same as it was when you went to bed at 90% humidity.

But since we're on the equator and on the ocean, I guess that's what you expect.

What in the world is that guy doing?

He's taking a bath.

So how do you take a bath where you're in the water half the time anyway.

Well, that's work, this is pleasure.

This is fun.

Yeah, fun.

So he can actually expand his feathers out too to get water in there.

Yeah, you see him getting water in between the feathers there and he'll probably shake it all off.

See.

Yeah, he's going down in.

Flapping.

Yeah.

The tide now is low so it's very perfect now to see the ghost crabs.

So they are digging holes right here and then trying to suck the sand and absorb the nutrients right here.

So they are like hiding in those holes, very, very, very, nice.

Take a look right there.

And I call ghost crabs because they are walking very fast and sometimes [whew] disappears.

That's why the name ghost crabs, right there, pink color.

This is a black mangrove.

It's one of the four species of mangroves that we have in the Galapagos Islands and these, like most of the mangrove, they live by the water.

And this one is working right now in front of us because take the water from the ocean and get rid of the salt, drop it right here to the leaves and that's why this is water because it's just cleaning the salinity to their leaves.

Well, that's a nice solving crystal there.

Look at the color That's beautiful.

This is olivine or peridote, which is a semi-precious stone and it's brought up by the magma.

These are the first minerals that form crystals and it has to be brought up very, very quickly for them to be complete like that or they just kind of meld into the magma and end up being very minute crystals rather than large ones like that.

So it had to be a very active, quick volcanic process.

Yes.

Things were going on very dramatically for that to form.

Exactly.

Look at the ash and cinder layer here from the volcanic activity.

So it's flying, like making popcorn and it's falling down red but not, the heat is not high enough to glue it to each other.

Yeah, and so you get cinder cones all over the florina here, down on the florina that we're on.

You know, an interesting thing about cinders, when you buy stone washed jeans, they use cinders to tumble the new jeans with to give them that stone washed look.

And that's what they use.

They're the cinders.

I haven't seen a big cactus yet but the farther from water we go, the more promising it looks.

Leco carpus darwinii, which is endemic to Floreana Island and also San Cristobal Island.

So we have only on these two islands.

It's Calesia vilosa.

It also is in the same family of sunflowers and margaritas and daisies to.

So the absence of pollinators is the reason why on Galapagos we don't have a lot of big and very colorful flowers.

That's why the flowers in the Galapagos are very tiny and we don't have many colors.

The only, the dominant colors are the yellow, the white and the purple.

So every plant or tree is very well designed to survive in, basically in environment like here, in the dry sun where we are now.

So the plants, they have to evolve according what they need.

In this case, this plant keep always the leaves and is covered with this fur, which avoids the evaporation of the water.

This is to save water.

That's why they have this little fur over here.

The island right here is much higher and also has different soil here.

And if I'm lucky, I'm going to find the columnar cactus I've been looking for.

They call it here the jasminosereus.

I've come several thousand miles to see it so it better be a good one.

Right here, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, this vegetation here is remarkable.

There are only a couple of species of trees but they are doing quite well and I think this is probably a bursera.

I feel as though I'm back in the edges of the Sonoran Desert where we have burseras that are the same thing.

But here we are 5,000, 6,000 miles away and we get the same type of tree, same characteristics.

You have to wonder in Nature's ability to re-create a desert landscape on a volcanic island that once had nothing growing on it.

It's a miracle.

All of the Galapagos is a miracle how all of the life got here, evolved, transformed the place into one of the wonders of the world.

So the big tall cacti here prefer to be up on the hillside or is it on the lavas?

Up on the hills normally but on lava too.

Like right there.

See right there.

Oh, that's a great one.

Jasminosereus cactus.

And right there where it's low like this see.

Yeah, there's another one.

You get a gold star for taking me to the columnar cactus.

How is it that such an odd huge plant could get to the Galapagos and only one kind.

Probably they came from the coast of Ecuador where there is a species very similar.

Yeah.

That I call the sausage cacti because there are segments in the arms and they look to me like sausages.

Oh, look, look, look, look.

See over the heads.

Oh, those are great.

.where the head hops so that in spite of the behavior they do usually for mating.

It's a courtship behavior then.

Exactly.

Most of them, so soon they will do this where the heads hop and they will synchronize like singing or dancing and then they will fly around all over this area.

That's an elaborate courtship where you not only stand in the water but you go flying as well.

I didn't expect to see a lot of flamingoes but sometimes we come here and there's nobody here.

But look it now.

You can see a number of them, a lot of them here.

A lot of pink spots everywhere.

Right.

And the whiter ones must be the juveniles.

Juveniles.

Yeah.

So that's a natural lake but it's not fresh water.

It's not fresh water because the water from this lake came basically from the ocean when it's very high tide.

The substrate here is all made of that cinder and so it's very, very porous and so the seawater at high tide can easily seep through that and then fill the lake.

The flamingoes are really colorful so they must be getting a lot of good nutrients there.

The diet that they have is a tiny shrimp, pink color, which is called artenia salina.

Oh, and the common name is brine shrimp.

And it's pink color and that's what gives them the pigmentation in the feathers.

[flamingo sounds] As you're looking down on the lake here, the track that they made while they're feeding, you can actually see the track in the mud as they're sitting there filtering the little brine, yeah, the brine shrimp.

They have two ways how they feed.

The one is called the passive and the other one is the active.

The passive is like that one right there.

He just walk in slowly with the head underwater, absorbing water like mad and trying to collect the shrimps and swallow.

That one is the passive.

The active is normally in shallow waters.

They are trying to shake them out like with their feet, like shaking, like dancing.

So they stir it up then, yes.

And the shrimps are coming outside of the mud and they catch them, moving their beak very, very fast.

It's almost like a machine [rrrrrrrrr], like that and then they catch them.

They have that interesting beak that's kind of curved that when they feed it's essentially upside down and they have these, a serrated edge and they filter feed.

Like baleens.

Filter for the, like baleen whales do.

Like the whales do.

And they strain out the little brine shrimp.

That's why the flamingo dance because the people thought they are dancing, you know, flamingoes dancing.

That's why the flamingo dance, but it's an eating behavior.

The flamingoes are here in the Galapagos all the time.

They move from like room to like room.

[flamingo sounds] There are estimated in the Galapagos like 600 pairs of them.

Yeah, about 600 pair, so 1200, a little over a thousand.

Yeah.

This trail in Galapagos National Park has taken us past not only flamingoes and sausage cacti but also leads us through desert scrub to a protected beach.

This is part of the dry zone above the beach area here and I notice that a lot of the plants don't have any leaves, like the bursera here.

Orocolos o palo santo, holy stakes.

It's because they are now loosing the leaves because they have to save the water for the dry season.

Boy, this sandy area just above high tide here is just filled with these huge depressions.

I mean, look how deep they are.

Like this one, well, is a good four feet wide and two foot deep and just dug out.

This is the nesting area of the green sea turtle?

Sea turtles.

Sea turtles, they are coming up here normally at night and with the tide they're coming up to the upper part of the beach and then they try to pull themselves because they can not walk like giant tortoises perhaps.

So they're coming over here and then they dig these holes.

The females are much bigger than the males.

So the female are much bigger because those are who carry their eggs and it has to carry the males during mating because they spend a long time on top of each other.

So the female is much stronger.

That's pretty impressive.

It looks like a tank track coming off the beach into the sand.

Here's what's left of a sea turtle egg.

It's either been preyed on or maybe hatched from times before.

But when they're laid, the shell is real leathery, just a soft pliable and the size of a ping pong ball.

Looks just like a ping pong ball.

Along the beach area there's two common crabs.

On the rocks at the water's edge is a real colorful one called a Sally Lightfoot.

It's red and blue.

Young ones are dark black so they really blend in with the lava.

And up on the sands of the beach area are hermit crabs.

These are little crabs that are more terrestrial and they take empty snail shells and use those as home.

And so as they grow bigger and bigger, they have to find a new shell to fit their body.

The Sally Lightfoot can feed on a number of things.

The algaes that are exposed, dead material, dead animals, so they scavenge everything.

And the Galapagos are rich.

The cold waters that up well here at the islands off the coast ring in tremendous nutrients.

So the marine life here is spectacular and that translates into all kinds of material for them to feed on, off the rocks here at the beach edge.

The sea brings in all sorts of interesting creatures including this thing, which you might think is a sea goat but it isn't.

It's actually a feral goat or a wild goat that was shod under a government program to eliminate goats.

They're extremely destructive of native vegetation and getting rid of them is a very high priority for the conservation of the Galapagos.

The government safeguards the islands, but the mariners who take us between islands seek other sources of protection.

Welcome.

Come into the captains bridge on our boat.

This relic in the front represents my and other Catholics belief in a dedication to this virgin, Narcisa de Jesus.

Right now the boat is going nine and a half knots an hour, which translates close to 11 miles an hour, and that's about standard.

So the entire trip to go to all the islands that normally are visited is about 400 miles, so it's not just a little trip across the bay.

The Galapagos Islands were routinely visited by seafaring folk, at least a hundred years before Charles Darwin.

I'm addressing a letter to my friend Alberto Burquez of the Centro de Ecología, the Ecology Center, in Hermosillo, Sonora.

He doesn't believe that mail actually leaves Floreana Island in the Galapagos.

I'm just going to prove that he's wrong.

All I have to do is get a stamp and we'll put it in the mailbox.

Here on Floreana Island.

Look at this.

..we have a place called the Post Office Bay.

And behind the beach we have this, which is like an historical place that since long time ago the pirates and the whalers used this as a post office.

And it works very, very simple.

You come over here with your letter, you open this little part right here and then you put right here your mail.

You find a place to stick it in.

These are all letters that other people have left.

So it's picked up once every 11 years whether it needs to be or not.

Okay.

And then we check what is here.

You go through until you find somebody from your own place.

Yeah.

You know, I might have to work out a special deal with Alberto because I'm not sure I can rely on anyone else to be going to Hermosillo, Sonora in the next two decades.

.no address.

No address.

You've got to have an address.

Genuine mail service in the Galapagos Islands.

Charleston.

USA.

Cataluña.

Taiwan.

Boy, it is worldwide.

But mostly Britain and the United States.

Denmark 1999.

So there's stuff from all over the place and varying degrees of cleverness.

Alberto, I may be wrong but this looks to me like a native cotton here.

It's gotta be.

You're right, David.

This is the Galapagos cotton.

It's closely related to the cotton in the mainland but has differentiated to a completely different species.

Now it's known as the Galapagos cotton.

So it's found only here in the Galapagos, then.

Only here.

The local inhabitants of Galapagos use it.

And I mean before the arrival of man.

Oh, before people got here.

Yes, that's right.

Darwin finches for example use them to build their nests.

They have nests built out of cotton?

Terrific.

This generalized bird that came here and diversified is an opportunistic species and all of them now include part of this cotton to their nests.

The islands vary in age from a few million years old to a few hundred thousand.

Each of the seven main islands has its own peculiar natural history.

So this is North Seymour Island and it specializes in boobies, in blue-footed boobies.

Yeah, in frigate birds too.

We have also land iguanas here and marine iguanas.

So we have a combination as well because you have sea lions, we have pelicans.

So we have almost everything together here.

The blue-footed boobies always they are changing positions and they are making poop, you know, like squeeze their bodies like this and they make lines.

And this plays a very important role in the nest because first it's marking a territory and second this guano that they produce is very high in alkaline and this keeps the insects away keeping the baby or eggs safe.

Some years they don't nest at all?

Exactly.

So that's why if there's a good opportunity for them so they will lay two or three eggs at least.

But if the next year is a bad year, a lot of them will die.

You'll seen this strewn with dead boobies.

Yeah.

Hi, boobies.

I don't want to interrupt and they're having a good time.

Sometimes we come here, nobody is here.

I mean no boobies.

Is that right?

Oh, then you have sea lions like to take advantage of the place too.

Yes.

You just come up on it.

It's so strange for us.

Look at the blue feet.

We have a winter sport called snowshoeing.

You have huge shoes and when you walk with those you walk like a booby.

How often do you see the various species of animals fighting or competing for a place among themselves?

Actually these animals right here they are not fighting very often because they are very good neighbors.

So they share the environment very well.

Look over here.

There's a booby walking almost on top of the sea lions.

Yeah, but they're playing.

They didn't even notice.

Look at these guys.

They are very good neighbors right here so they are sharing the same environment.

This guy over here is a male and anytime he can attack you because.

Oh, it's his territory.

Yeah.

.his territory, yes.

Essentially every island here in the Galapagos has sea lions on it because the marine environment here is very, very rich.

Tremendous numbers of fish.

And the sea lions, you can tell from the true seals in that they have an external ear flap, which the true seals don't.

They just have a hole with no ear flap.

Also the sea lions can rotate their limbs underneath of them and actually walk across the beach and up on rocks where true seals can't.

Typically sea lions have a single pup.

The pup stays with the mother for about nine months to a year and then is weaned and then she'll breed again.

Well, the sea lions behind me are probably youngsters two or three years old.

They've already been weaned so mom's gone, they're on their own and they may not necessarily be siblings.

They're just real gregarious.

They like the contact.

But they're pretty, on their own.

And here in the Galapagos it's amazing cause you can get so close to 'em and they're just not bothered with me being here this close.

But these animals they have like a very good wet suit.

Yes, they have the best wet suit.

It helps them to insulate their bodies.

And there's no rain, that means that it's kind of cold.

So if he's cold, so we have a lot of nutrients in the ocean.

So let's say when we have like.

A long drought.

.long drought, the land species, let's say land birds like mockingbirds or plants in general, so they will have a very hard time.

But in the ocean they have a good time because there's a lot of nutrients.

But if it's warm, if it's raining like that, land species, they're having a good time because there are a lot of insects, plants vegetation to eat.

Marine animals that depends from the ocean so they will have a hard time because they don't have enough food in the ocean.

So will they move to where the water is colder?

Exactly.

Strange and wonderful world of the Galapagos Islands deeply influenced the thinking of Charles Darwin and ultimately the world.

The wonders that he saw and heard are still available for us today.

Lava mountains rising the ocean floor.

Swimming dragons spitting from their nostrils.

Weird spiny plants and tortured landscape.

This may sound like the stuff of a science fiction movie, but it's the true story of evolution and adaptation in the Galapagos Islands.

Next time on the Desert Speaks.

But you've got to tell me why there was a tunnel here.

In the places where we have volcanic action where are lava tubes, so we have a lot of these lava tunnels and it's possible for us to get inside because the ceiling of this part collapsed.

So we have a hole right here, an entrance, so we can go down.

Will you guarantee me that the rest of it won't collapse while we're inside?

We hope not.

I hope not too.

No guarantees.

Are we going to need a light in there, Harry?

Yeah, we'll need a flashlight.

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.