Click here for Bird 1 Gallery Click here for Bird 2 Gallery Click here for Birds in Flight Gallery Click here for Cold-Blooded Species Gallery Click here for Sea Lion Gallery

Galapagos Birds 2

For 2 weeks starting in the middle of September, 2006, my wife and I traveled to Quito, Ecuador, and then on to the Galapagos Islands, for a spectacular visit to this unique part of the world. For 10 nights and 11 days, we lived on the "Tip Top IV" a 120-foot Yacht, with 13 other passengers, our 2 Guides, and about 8 crew-members. Patti Stucki and Richard Parsons were our guides, and they were phenomenal - extremely knowledgeable, enthusiastic and anxious to do anything possible to make our trip the best it could be. We also spent an extra day in Quito, Ecuador, traveling to the Cotopaxi Volcano, which while exhausting (hiking at 16,000 feet is no easy task!) was quite worthwhile. We used Galapagos Travel for our trip - we were extremely pleased with how well things went, and I would definitely recommend them to anybody considering a trip to the Galapagos.

This is the 2nd of 5 small galleries with images from this trip. Many of the species in this collection are endemic to the Galapagos Islands. The naming for many of these species is not particularly creative, however - it's either a Lava-this, or a Galapagos-that! But that doesn't detract from the uniqueness of the animals themselves. We would spend a day or two visiting an island, and then do an evening 'navigation' to get to the next one we'd be visiting. We saw a few whales and dolphins during some daytime navigation as well.

In addition, there were daily opportunities to snorkel. The water was surprisingly cold (mid 60's), considering that we were at the equator, which diminished my enthusiasm for this aspect of hte trip a bit (despite wearing a 3mm wetsuit, boots and hood!). On a couple of these snorkel trips, we encountered sea lions, which seemed to enjoy being with us - they'd swim around us, often heading straight for us, only to dive down at the last second. Quite exciting!

I again used the GPS System (Delorme's BlueLogger Hardware, with RoboGeo software) to record and later plot where we had been visiting, geolocate the photographs, and export to Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can download the open this file to see where the images in this gallery were taken, superimposed on Google Earth's current satellite imagery. I have also written an article for the NatureScapes photography website, on how this can be done, which can be viewed here.

All Content © Donald L. Cohen, MD All Rights Reserved Click on each thumbnail to open up a larger image.

These images, along with all the others present in the various galleries, are available for purchase as prints up to 13"x19". For more details on buying prints, please click here.

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Galapagos Penguin 1

Galapagos Penguin 2

Flighless Cormorants

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

American Oystercatcher eating Crab

American Oystercatcher in the Surf

Galapagos Hawk

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Lava Heron

Striated Heron

Flamingo

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Yellow Warbler

Large Ground Finch

Galapagos Flycatcher

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Click here for a larger image

Vermillion Flycatcher

Galapagos Mockingbird

Galapagos Dove