Howard Wigg, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii, welcome one and all. As you are very well aware, Hawaii was the first state to declare the goal of 100% clean energy by the year 2045, and one of the ways we're going to accomplish that is keeping our AC load, air conditioning load under control, and if the whole planet is going to survive and not drown in CO2, the whole planet needs to keep its AC load under control, because if you project worldwide, given global warming, the biggest, biggest increase in demand for electricity will be for AC. Enter our guest today, Stephen Sasaki from NIDON Clean Energy. NIDON is a local company, and they've been growing like mad, and what they can do is drastically reduce the amount of electricity needed in an AC system to produce the same amount of whole air. So welcome, Stephen. Thank you so much for being our guest today. And as we were talking before the show, I just recently came back from a conference, and one of the presenters has been spending some years in India, especially in Northern India, where they are having extreme, extreme heat waves to the point where people are literally dying from the heat. And we know there is going to be this huge increase in demand for air conditioning, and actually the same is going to be true for all over the world. So one thing we can do to ameliorate the production of CO2, carbon dioxide, which is the greenhouse gas, is render our air conditioning systems much more efficient, and that is where you, Stephen, take over. Please introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about NIDON Green Energy, and then let's get launched into your super-efficient product. All right. Well, thank you for the introduction, and thank you to ThinkTech Hawaii for this opportunity to share technology, because we know it's a game-changing technology, and it'll help businesses, residential help the people for and really around the world save a lot of electricity in the coming years. First of all, I'm the Vice President of Sales and Marketing and Business Development for NIDON Clean Energy. Nick Dizon is our president. He's been on the show, and he's done a great job promoting our technology in the Philippines and United Arab Emirates, as well as Hawaii and the West Coast. So we're moving on, and I'm on board to help him get Hawaii greener. And so what in the world kind of technology are you talking about here, Stephen? Our technology is installing a solar panel onto an air conditioning system or refrigeration system, and the panel has parabolic arrays that track the sun and absorb the heat and give the heat, provide the heat to the freon in the system, which superheats the freon and saves electricity by increasing the temperature and pressure of the freon in the system, thus making the compressor more efficient. What kind of temperature are we talking about, Stephen? Can you show the first slide? We'll take a little diagram, a schematic of the system. And as you can see there, that panel is your energy absorption thermal panel that again heats the freon, and it works in conjunction with the compressor. And as it increases in pressure, it reduces the energy needed to turn the compressor, which is your main consumer of electricity in the air conditioning slash refrigeration cycle. It superheats it, and as it comes out of the panel, it becomes super saturated and cools down, and it saves that electricity for your customer and for your electricity bill. And what percentage are you using compared to just a conventional HVAC system? We have results average 40%, and as we were talking earlier, some of the systems we've seen as much as 70%, not solely attributed to the SunTrack panel, but their conditioning system that people have on the roof many times aren't maintained and fall into disrepair. And so we change it out with the new variable speed, multi-stage newer technology in conjunction with SunTrack. We've seen 70% incredible. And with the tax credits that we'll talk about later, there's a slide, we are actually able to save customers, I mean, a return on investment in cases two years. We're normally in an air conditioning system, you just get a depreciation, and your return on investment is 15, 20 years. So with the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits as well as the energy savings, we can give you a return on investment anywhere from two to five years. And again, on that slide, the investment tax credits, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, it allows companies or even residents to save anywhere up to 70% in cases 80% off the cost of your system. Specifically, you get 40% off the federal tax taxes, which is actually broken down between the 30% of the renewable energy. And the administration also put 10% if your equipment is made in the USA. So our equipment is made in Tempe, Arizona. And that counts for the next 10%. There's also tax credits for architects and engineers. We also talked about Hawaii energy rebate, where we keep the data for you, we put an electronic gauge onto your system, we measure before and we measure after, and Hawaii energy tax credits will give you cash for a more efficient air conditioning system. And lastly, the law allows you to accelerate your depreciation on the system, which again, it turns out to be 70% in cases, even more reduction on your air conditioning system. And just a little background about Hawaii energy, when you look at your electricity bill, look at the back of it, you see this long list of additional expenses. And in this case, it's the public benefits fee, I believe. And that comes from your bill to the PUC, the Public Utilities Commission. And their Kuliana is to monitor and, if possible, reduce the cost of different utilities, certainly in the electric utility. And they pass that cash on to, well, complicated, but to Hawaii energy. And Hawaii energy's Kuliana is to look at all possible energy efficiency measures and see which gives the best payback and then provide money to that to reduce the customer's cost of adopting this new energy efficient to technology. So new folks are right up there on the customized efficiency measure list. And I'm gathering from your description that that's working very well, Stephen. Yes. Yes, it is. Thank you for pointing that out, Howard. That's very important. And it's really educating our customers that you have components of your electricity bill that comprise of that energy tax that many people don't know, your peak load and your consumption load. So there's variables in there that our technology help you shave all of those components of your electricity bill. And it is very complicated. It's not a simple calculation to determine what your electricity bill is. So I'm not the expert, but I can help you understand what your components are. But that's an excellent point that you get charged the tax. You don't get the credits. And you know, it just doesn't it doesn't get dispersed. Yeah, let me elaborate on that a bit. Stephen, we have the Hawaiian, Hawaiian Electric and the Kauai, K-I-U-C on Kauai are both looking at the fact that we have so much photovoltaic energy in this state right now, we've far exceeding per capita any other state. We in the middle of the day, we, the photovoltaics are producing too much electricity for the utility to handle. So we're moving more and more over towards storage, putting that excess electricity into big battery size or refrigerator size batteries. And I'm using that for to shave the peak. The demand for electricity starts going up about five in the afternoon when everybody's coming home from work and school. And it goes up to a peak when everybody's eating dinner watching TV. All the guests have come back from the beach and shopping and what another and the hotels are going and the restaurants are going full blast. But what this technology does is what's called shaves that peak. You're reducing the amount of energy consumed in the first place. So you are helping to shave down that peak evening demand. And incidentally Hawaiian Electric is in the process of adopting TOU, time of use pricing, where energy will be very cheap in the middle of the day and very expensive in the evening peak. So regardless of where you are, you're going to, your technology is going to be reducing the all over cost, including the cost of that evening peak electricity. So great point, great segues to my next slides, Howard, and thank you for bringing it up. So now this is getting into the, really the nuts and the bolts, but I think it's important to describe that one of our Sunshark panels equates to seven and a half tons of refrigeration or 90,000 BTU of energy saved. You know, if you did that, if you did that calculus, which, you know, I, you know, I just take it for granted, but it comes out in rough order of magnitude. One of our panels saves about 30, the equivalent of 36 PV panels of power generation. So it's, it's kind of, it's different. One saves one generates, but can you imagine if you got one Sunshark panel, it replaces 36 PV panels. So if you're running out of space and you're not close to your net zero goals, Sunshark will help you if you have an AC that's running 24 seven or even 12 hours a day. So that's something to consider. And I, and obviously we're trying to meet the greenhouse gas emissions or reduce those emissions. So it's a, it's a great way of doing that for our customers. And where have you installed so far in Hawaii, Stephen? Oh, we've had customers at a shipping company in San Island. We've done eight CND. We are also at animal clinic in Kaimakee and as well as Heinrich trucking. As we spoke earlier, Nick is pushing very hard. We've got some installs in the Philippines, which is going to grow very quickly because Philippine law is a lot different from American law. They're mandated to reduce electricity, not, you know, get tax credit. So that's very promising for our technology as well as, as I spoke earlier, United Arab Emirates is we're breaking the market there as well. As I noted earlier, the demand for electricity as the earth gets hotter, the demand for AC is just going to increase, increase, increase. Yes, absolutely. On the next slide, Howard, we talked about the, you know, if you're, if you're running your system, like your car, if you're running at 40% less, you're going to see a life expectancy that grows. That picture on the bottom left shows the greens sealant that we put on our condensers because our condensers are subjected to water and salt, and that's not a good combination for aluminum and copper. But because the condensing fan is running slower, there's less air, less water, less salt, less corrosion or oxidation happening to the condenser. And it ultimately lasts longer because you're not heating and cooling and heating and cooling and having all that thermal expansion going up and down, and you're really protecting the life of your system. And so if you look at the system on the top, that was recently, we took that picture when we recently installed that system in November of 2022. That's the baseline of the greenness or the protect other protecting that we put on. And then, then the bottom right shows a system that didn't have soundtrack and you can see that the sealant just gets, you know, it just gets a, you know, abuse and it doesn't last as long. So we've been having great success with longevity and trouble or no trouble calls with soundtrack installed. So because again, we're running 40% less, the system runs smoother and we expect it to last a lot longer. Now a good analogy might be with a car, if you're in traffic and you're going stop, start, stop, start, stop, stop, stop, stop, that is very hard on the engine and indeed on the whole drivetrain. Whereas if you're, fortunately for you on Oahu, you have a big stretch of open road and you're just cruising along at the requisite 55 miles an hour. Number one, you're getting much better gas mileage. Number two, it's much easier on all the moving parts and on the drivetrain and the life of your car is extended. So same, isn't this the same principle? You know, Howard, yes, it is definitely. If you can go to the next slide, Howard, we didn't rehearse this, but you're a, it seems as though you're a mind reader. But in our processes, what we do is we actually put an e-gauge as I spoke earlier. We put an e-gauge on the system because number one, it'll benefit your Hawaii tax credit. Number two, we want to show the customer what your savings will look like. And number three, it allows me to show somebody and you see that red box and it might be an eye chart on the screen, but that red box shows 79 amps on an old system. So we're looking at a, we're looking at a time histogram of how much amperage was used by a system which is on 24 seven. So you can see on the left side on the old system, an R22 system, you can see that we hit 79 amp peak. And again, that one peak will dictate your peak load calculations for your kilowatt hour, cents per kilowatt hour for the next 11 months on the HECO bill. Now you can see on the right side, when we installed the new system, the average is somewhere down in the 28 amp range. And you can see the swings of the day, how the compressor ramps up, ramps down, ramps up, ramps down. And you can see the magnitude decrease with the SunTrack panel. So there's many different components here. But again, the $6,300, I mean, if I said 6,700, I apologize, but it's $6,300 that this company qualified for in Hawaii Energy tax credits, not to mention the inflation reduction app credits, et cetera. So we come in, we install the gauges, we make sure that you see the data. So you know that you're saving money and it should, it will equate to dollars in your pocket throughout the life of the system. So we do this for our customers as part of the process. And we might ask the question in a broader picture, why is the federal government and why is Hawaii state government rewarding people for taking energy efficiency measures like this? Answer, our biggest export of dollars is to fossil fuel to foreign countries. And when we, the more we use efficient equipment like this, the less electricity we use, and the less we have to import, so we're not pouring out those dollars. And then the customer, be he or she a homeowner or a large business, they are reducing their utility costs. They're able to keep that money in their pocket and hopefully reinvest it in our, for our hope, to bring in even more energy efficient equipment. And all of that, as you're reducing your electricity use, you're reducing your production of carbon dioxide, which is the greenhouse sketch, which is warming up the entire earth. Yes. So far we've gotten in Hawaii, we've gotten away just utterly blissfully. I mean, we had a beautiful winter last year was beautiful, but much of the rest of the world is literally sweltering away. And one of these days, it's going to hit us and it's going to hit us a big time. So the more action may more proactive we are now to reduce CO2 production better, we will be and we lead the world to Hawaii. I go to conventions and Hawaii is one of the leaders in the nation. Thank you, Howard. Great, great points. I do want to add to not only do we install an e-gauge on your system, I actually forecast using, you know, a spreadsheet how much cash you'll save over a period of time after the system pays for itself. And, you know, at, at times businesses that shared with me their eco bill, and it's been anywhere from 39 to 40 to 44 cents per kilowatt hour.  It's incredible the amount of money that a business can save while using the tax credits, the cash rebates, et cetera. It's a big amount of money that businesses can put back into it. Business owners and residents can put back into their their pockets. Yeah, and we're keeping dollars in Hawaii rather than exporting those dollars overseas. Yes, sir. Absolutely, absolutely. So there's there's a couple game change game changers that are happening with our constant. It's called it's considered in the in the department of energy US Department of Energy is considered concentrating solar thermal power energy technology. So with that technology, one of the game changers is in President Biden's investing in America again. There is a elective pay or also known as the direct pay methodology which enables not for profits state, local municipalities, tribal, another US territory should take advantage of tax credits. Well, actually, it's a cash rebate because non for profits of these entities don't don't pay taxes and don't have tax credits, but you can actually get cash through the this new program that the inflation reduction enacted. So that's very exciting for those those entities. Right. And as we draw to a close, I should make it clear that I'm with the Hawaii State Energy Office State Government entity. We are not endorsing need on clean energy. No, not at all. Thank you. Simply featuring this company because there's so much in the forefront there in the cutting edge of energy reduction, nor is this in endorsed by our sponsors here. So with that being said, though, and I fully acknowledge that this is not a commercial for SunTrack nor need on clean energy, but we do have a system going in at Bilger Hall in the University of Hawaii at Manoa. We are we are actively installing doing that install now. So we we are collaborating with our local government to get this technology and to save taxpayer money. Yeah, very appropriate because again, Hawaii was the first state to declare 100% clean energy as a goal. And now we're moving to the UH Manoa campus to this sounds like it's going to be a demonstration project. Yes, sir. It is it's a small unit and we want to prove our technology and we're very confident it'll prove all. So we have we're installing it there. And lastly, if I may, because I know we're running out of time, there's a company Easy Roots that their mission is to provide rapid profits for produced agriculture with challenging issues such as starting and operating cultivation facilities because there's high costs. So they're using SunTrack with their HVAC systems and setting up at a much reduced cost, implementing the reduction inflation reduction tax credits. They and you know sustainability with agriculture or controlled environments. This is going to be good for self sufficiency in growing our next generation agriculture. So it's it's pretty exciting that they're taking this technology and again, taking this technology to the United Arab Emirates and in the US in deserts and where you have very harsh conditions, not conducive for agriculture. So we're really excited about Easy Roots taking this to the next level. Yeah, in addition to climate change, there will be a food crisis because of the increasing global temperatures. There's whole areas of the world now, especially the Horn of Africa East Africa that is literally drying up before our eyes and it's driving out the agricultural people who have been there for centuries and centuries and centuries. There's just no way for them to make a living. And so they're headed for the cities and the cities are already overcrowded. So very, very sad situation. And this is just going to get worse and worse and worse. So to the extent that we can start to grow food in controlled environments at a very low energy cost, that's going to really, really, really benefit just literally billions of people. We have hundreds of millions of people on the brink of starvation already. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. We should be very fortunate, feel fortunate, but I know people are struggling as well. So our job is really to help businesses succeed and people put money in their pockets and be more efficient. And we just want to improve the life in here in Hawaii and around the world. And I know we have the most beautiful climate in the world and the most beautiful agricultural growing climate in the world. But still, I know there are experiments out in the middle of the island where they're growing food in greenhouses carefully controlled, very low energy use, maybe thanks to your technology. And they are growing food at least twice as rapidly as you could in the, in the great outdoors. So maybe come into your grocery store near you in the next few years. Yes. Yes. It's definitely optimized for growth. They know the, they know the light patterns and they know, you know, what's, what's optimal temperature and, and it's, it's, they can produce it really fast and efficiently. Yes. And not subjected to harsh winds. I think wind is a big factor or over too much rain or, you know, those things are, are now controlled and won't be impact negatively impacted in those situations. And on that very cherry note, Stephen Sasaki, thank you very much for representing need on clean energy and congratulations to you. And let's get a lot of systems in there so we can reduce the demand for electricity and the production of the CO2. So Howard Wigg, Code Green, Think Tech Hawaii. Thank you very much, our esteemed audience and see you next time. Hawaii.com. Mahalo.


So may I have your attention again. My name is Bill Graven with your county Audubon delighted to have you. As we were just saying, this is our first in person program in close to three years. And we can't wait to get back into the swing of having in person programs again. Our last one was in November 19. We had one schedule for March 22 after our winter break, and that got canceled. And then we discovered zoom and we've been happily zooming since for the last almost three years but but very happy to be back here tonight and we're attempting to do present this program in two ways by zoom and in person and our fingers are crossed that this will work out successfully. Please feel free to send us any feedback you might have as to whether it worked wherever you are zooming in from. Okay, and that's all I'll jump from there to mentioning that our program for next month will be attempting to do the same thing of live and in person and also zoom. And our presenter will be Nick Lund, who is a great guy great presenter he works for main Audubon. He is known by around the country around the world as the birdist. That's the name of a blog he publishes with very entertaining things about birds and other naturalist subjects. He also is the author of the newly published American birding association field guide to the birds of Maine. He's been doing a number of great things with and publishing. So please check out and take a look at our website for additional information on that. I know you'll enjoy it if you have a chance to see it the name of the program, which I omitted. It's all the best birds of Maine so he's going to take about an hour and fit as much information about main birds as he can into that period of time. It's actually Tuesday, October 18, I believe, and information is on our website. But tonight, we're delighted to have with us our board member, Laurie poacher, who this month or two ago, took a trip that I am jealous of her having taken. I have not been there but she traveled to the Galapagos spent 11 days there took about 2 million pictures. And but she's not going to show she promise not to show more than 1 million tonight. I know it was I know it was very challenging for her to try to wade through all her pictures and figure out which one should she should include here. But I know she's done a great job of that pictures in a few video clips slipped in as well. So, without further ado, I'll turn it over to Laurie. Hi everybody, and welcome to Wells Reserve and welcome to the to the folks at home. I'm going to spend the next hour or so taking you through some photos from the Galapagos as Bill mentioned I was there for 11 days. I didn't quite take 2 million pictures but I did take a lot. And I think I managed to cram around 250 of them into this presentation so if I'm talking too fast. I just know that you can go home and watch the zoom program and slow it down. If you need to all the pictures in this presentation with the exception of just a few are are my own. I'll point out the ones that aren't mine. And that was not bringing any underwater equipment with me so when we went snorkeling. I didn't even have a GoPro I had nothing so I put a call out some of the other workshop participants. And they responded to help me out so let's see if we can get this rolling. There we go so little housekeeping so as Bill mentioned we're in a hybrid program so I'm going to split my time, looking at the beautiful faces here in front of me and at the screen so as not to any folks at home. If you are on zoom, and my face is blocking part of the screen just grab that little box and minimize it or drag it out of the way. If you have any questions at home you are muted, you can type it into the q amp a box at the bottom. And those of you here if you have any questions I'm just. I'm happy to stay as long as you want I'll talk about the Galapagos all day, any day. Let's talk about the archipelago. So it's about 600 miles from Ecuador pretty much due west of Ecuador, it's comprised of 127 islands, islands and rocks. 19 of them are considered large or main islands only four of them are actually in habit. It's named UNESCO World Heritage Site in 86 the Galapagos Marine Reserve was formed in 98 it was extended to the current areas about 50,000 square miles and it's one of the largest marine reserves in the world currently. In terms of access there's only airports on two of the 127 islands the rest rely on ports to receive merchandise. So about 300,000 people are lucky enough to call the Galapagos home, and that swells to about 300,000 with tourism each year. The uninhabited islands are really really strictly controlled Ecuador is all about conserving this amazing space. They just some of the examples of some of the things they do they limit the number of boats that are allowed in the Galapagos and they assign the itineraries. In advance or more than a year in advance a full year in advance I should say. So for example, we were on an 11 day itinerary after after we left the boat they picked up another group of passengers and did a seven day itinerary and then swapped out for another seven day and then they had two weeks off. And that all that's planned out times however many boats there are so that they can kind of do traffic control so there's anywhere we went we never saw more than two or three other boats. So it keeps the crowds down on the islands as well. You have to be accompanied by a park service guide we're talking before about you know if you if you get an Airbnb on Santa Cruz you can't just charter a boat and go over to Floriana by yourself you have to be accompanied by a park service guide you have to do a tour. When you're on a tour, they don't just take you to the island and say you know meet back here in four hours you have to stay together as a group, you have to stay on the paths. And of course they always ask that we keep a respectful distance from the wildlife. And I was laughing because in the Galapagos a respectful distance from the wildlife is six feet. And, and often the wildlife don't know the rules and they will come closer than six feet. I have quite a few examples of that. One thing they do that affected us anyway is they're only allowed you're only allowed on the uninhabited islands from sunrise to sunset. So there's no overnight camping, there's no bonfires on the beach, there's no astrophotography which is a shame because it's so dark out there. That would be fantastic but sunrise to sunset that's it. So here's a map showing the Galapagos you can see it was formed by by volcanoes you can see the craters on some of the islands. 97% of the emerged surface of the land 97% was declared a national park in 1959. So all those restrictions I just talked about applied to 97% of the land surface. Human settlements are restricted to the remaining 3% and that's very tiny little zones on four of the 127 islands. Top four was our home for 11 days it's a 125 foot 16 passenger motor yacht and it was manned by eight crew and that includes the captain and our park service guide. It's outfitted with two lifeboats I don't know if you can see the cursor on the screen but there's one lifeboat hanging on the side here. The water is in the water they're reloading the life jacket so I took this from the dock right as the first group of eight had already gone on to the tip top and they were coming back to get the rest of us. So that was kind of fun. And the water is really that color. Here's a group of our workshop participants were from all over the world there were only four of us from the US the rest were from Canada Germany the Netherlands Italy Switzerland Hungary and Ecuador. She diriladini on the far right was the photographer that actually sponsored the workshop. Fantastic conservation photographer if you're not following her on Instagram you should be next to her as her husband David who is an artist and a photographer as we were super fortunate on this trip to also have to we deroid she's forth from the left to grew up in the Galapagos. smooth there when she was two years old or something. But she was actually the first naturalist guide when tourism started in the Galapagos in the late 60s. So we were super excited to have her between her and Andres who is in the inset. He took this group photo so he's not in it. They planned the itinerary for us each day. And in each night before dinner we would have a little briefing where we would talk about what we're going to do the next day. And it was kind of in this function room on the boat where they had a big wall map of the Galapagos islands with kind of a glass glass covered frame and he would take a sharp another sharpie a dry erase marker and map out where we were going each day. So we started kind of in the middle here in Baltra. And the first day we only went about an hour to North Seymour spent the afternoon there and then overnight took about eight hours to get up to Hena Vesa. Then overnight the next night back down to Santiago around the top of Isabella then down to Fernandina spent the next couple days exploring the coast the west coast of Isabella then down to Floriana up to Santa Cruz down to Espanola around to San Cristobal and then back to the last morning we spent like an hour on a little islet called Mosquera before heading back to the airport. So we covered a lot of ground. My advice to any of you if you are fortunate enough to get to the Galapagos go for the longest itinerary you can find. A seven-day itinerary is not even going to cover all of this everything that we saw and some of the four and five-day itineraries really only cover Hena Vesa and Santiago and Santa Cruz and you miss out on everything else. When I was putting this presentation together I really struggled with how to present it. I started going chronologically through my thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures and just throwing pictures into this presentation kind of in chronological order and then I decided that's the way I experienced it so that's the way I'm going to share it. So that's why we're calling it 11 days. I'm going to take you literally day by day through my trip. So our days were full we went sunrise to sunset and my first aha moment was when I realized that on the equator the sun always rises at 6 a.m and always sets at 6 p.m. The days don't get any longer in the summer and they don't get shorter in the winter and it seems so obvious to me now but I literally remember it at the moment going ah equator it means equal. Yeah so our days were full so each night we had a whiteboard and I know you can't read it. I'll show you a bigger ones later but we would map out what we were going to see the next day and there were basically four excursions a day so we were super busy. By day three it became apparent that it was not sustainable and we'd have to start sitting some things out or I was going to just drop from exhaustion but we'd have an early morning late morning early afternoon and late afternoon excursion and it was any combination of the things you can see in the top left there so a wet or a dry landing just means they would take us from the boat. So the boat would anchor away from the island we never pulled up to a dock these are all uninhabited islands. We'd pile into the lifeboats two lifeboats are pengas and they'd get as close to the land as they could. If it was a wet landing it means you're just throwing your legs over the side and getting into the water so you might be ankle deep you might be knee deep depending on how tall you are and then you walk ashore from there. A dry landing they'll pull up to like a rocky outcropping sometimes a man-made dock not very often mostly rocks and you would just step out of the boat onto a rock and keep your feet dry. So they were nice enough to tell us the night before whether it was a wet or dry landing so you knew what to wear on your feet. Some of the days we would or some of these excursions we would stay in the pangas in the boats we wouldn't actually go ashore so we would ride along cliffs or into coves or through mangroves any place that we couldn't go ashore we would access via the lifeboats so you know eight people in each lifeboat it was a little crowded but we made do. The hiking range anywhere from an easy walk to like a power hike mostly in between it was mostly lava walks a lot of uneven kind of hilly terrain you had to watch where you were putting your feet sometimes loose rocks but a nice a big a big variation of strenuous to easy in terms of hikes and then snorkeling eight different opportunities to go snorkeling over the 11 days and of course photography was the overarching objective for this entire trip and the excursions were really planned thanks to Tui who's a photographer and a conservationist I should mention in addition to being a naturalist and a guide the excursions were planned to kind of maximize wildlife viewing and to optimize natural light so they really made sure that we were in the best place at the best time to get some pictures so our first day we were in North Seymour and there's the iconic blue-footed booby it's kind of the national bird of Ecuador everywhere you go even in mainland Ecuador all the gift shops you know I can't tell you how many t-shirts hats keychains I love boobies it was everywhere but North Seymour also is home to the largest colony of magnificent frigate birds in the Galapagos so I'm going to talk about those first there's actually two different species of frigate birds in the Galapagos great and magnificent and they look a lot alike so they're big they have like a seven or eight foot wingspan the males are dark all over the females have a white chest and the way you tell them the great from the magnificent bird is by the color of the iridescent wings on their back so they both have that big red gular sac that they inflate when they're corning you can see this picture here there's a greenish sheen on the on the feathers on the bow that makes that a great frigate bird it's nice that it's mnemonic right green and great you don't have to remember anything beyond that the magnificent frigate birds have a purple sheen a purple iridescent sheen on their backs if you stretch it and call it magenta then you also have a nice mnemonic to remember magenta and magnificent the females are a little more tricky they don't have that sheen they're a little drab and I apologize in here you can't see that female too well but her eyes she has red irons so that's what you need to tell the females apart the great frigate birds have red irons the magnificent frigate bird females have blue irons and then the immatures have white heads that's how you can tell them from the adults you can tell the species the easiest way is to see who's feeding it the second easiest way is by the iran again so that one has a blue iran so what kind of frigate bird is that magnificent a plus a plus I want to share with you a video of a male trying to attract a female it's not just a spectacle but the sound that comes out of these birds is like nothing I would have expected it doesn't sound like anything natural it sounds like well I'll let you hear it but think about when you're listening to it I'll play it twice what musical instrument or what kind of device this kind of sound should be coming from is it loud enough say it again does that remind you of anything sound like anything I think it's called a slide whistle right and then the I knew it like a New Year's Eve noisemaker that rattling sound that it makes crazy and and again I was more than six feet away I took this with my iPhone from the path less than 10 feet away from this bird he couldn't care less he had his mind elsewhere and then the blue-footed boobies a huge nesting colony of blue-footed boobies there's actually three species of boobies in the Galapagos the the blue-footed are about two and a half feet tall with about a five foot wingspan they only weigh about three and a half to five pounds they nest on the ground you can see on the top left he's got three eggs or she's got three eggs in a in a scrape typically I think 80% of the time they said there's only two eggs so the our our park service guide was super excited to see three eggs with this particular clutch on the top right you can see some of the courtship behavior they stomped those and waved those big blue beautiful feet trying to catch a female's attention and on the bottom left you know head and tail pointed to the sky and they hold their wings at all these kind of weird weird angles and on the bottom right you can see a nest with two young chicks and they start out all white so these were probably only less than a week old we also saw a lot of land iguanas on North Seymour these guys are endemic to Galapagos and they're one of the largest lizards in the world they're three to five feet long these things are huge and they can weigh up to 25 pounds which is like one of my dogs I mean they're big I love the camel on these guys the you can see the inspiration for army fatigues on the top right they look even the bright orange the is a almost a perfect match to the color of the rocks where they live so you have really have to watch where you're walking in the Galapagos and in the upper left you can see one kind of gnashing on a prickly pear cactus which is what makes up a large portion of their diet and like a lot of animals when you're when you're photographing wildlife they always tell you to try to get like a three-quarter profile but when they look straight at you they don't look like animals anymore they start to look like humans right so you can you start to enter and throw more I can't say that word but anyway it looks like you're smiling and it makes me it makes me smile every time I look at that picture we also saw a couple more endemic species on North Seymour the first of Darwin's finches so there's a group of I want to say 13 or 14 Darwin's finches that he discovered or named the small ground finch was the first one and there's small medium and large ground finches very original this the and the size description is only partly about the bird it's more about the size and shape of the bill relative to its head so the small ground finch has a pointy slender kind of conical bill and I'll show you the medium and large we saw those in subsequent days Galapagos sea lions also a species that's endemic to the Galapagos they were kind of posing and splashing around on the tide pools and then swallow tailed gulls I'll talk about more in a bit but we did see our first ones there so wanted to catalog them so our first afternoon was like wow how are we going to top that well we did the next I mentioned after dinner we headed north to Hena Vesa took about eight hours it was a rough crossing over open water there was not a lot of sleeping going on that night we arrived just before sunrise started the morning on Darwin Bay then there was the first snorkeling opportunity it was more of a practice there wasn't much to see the water was super murky and after lunch we spent a couple hours in the pangas along the cliffs and then we walked along a lava trail to the top of El Barranco so here's day two Darwin Bay they refer to it as bird island but the the welcoming committee was sea lions they were on the beach they were on the paths again trying to keep six feet away from these animals when they're laying diagonally across the path and there's ground nesting shorebirds on either side you can't physically keep six feet away from them so we just tried to tip toe around them and not disturb them as best we could honestly they couldn't care less so maybe they'd open one eye lift up ahead look and they go back to sleep so that was fine the second booby species the red-footed booby they're the smallest of the three about 28 inches tall these guys nest in trees and they're the only species of booby in the Galapagos that has an opposable toe so they're the only ones that can actually perch on branches so if you see a booby in a tree it's a red-footed booby the color on their faces the bottom picture in the center there again 10 or 15 feet away i had a 400 millimeter zoom that i was shooting with which allowed me to get some of that beautiful color and detail they were just spectacular looking and then the swallowtailed gulls these also nest in the ground these are the ones we're tiptoeing around trying to get past the sea lions um anything i'm going to ask you a question and sorry the zoom people can't answer but um anything strike you about these birds you can jump out at me the size of the eye a plus dan gardoku what does a big eye mean on a bird or any animal really night vision exactly wow we got a smart group here today yeah they're nocturnal they're the only not fully nocturnal species of gull in the world i believe um and they you know bigger eyes they can see better at night just like you know a camera with a wide open aperture right it lets more light and that's kind of the theory behind it um so they actually feed on fish that come to the surface to feed at night uh and again they're endemic to the Galapagos some familiar faces a whole family of uh yellow crown night herons at least three very young juveniles that were kind of horsing around and wrestling it was fun to watch them uh and then another two more uh endemic species of Galapagos mockingbird super curious this bird followed us around we kept trying to get away from it it was hopping down the path after us it didn't want us to leave and the Galapagos dove which is about the size and shape of a morning dove but much brighter you know it's hard to see in this picture a beautiful blue eye ring those bright reddish pink feet and really flashy white wings when they when they fly um a couple more of Darwin's finches so the Hena Vesa ground finch at the top female on the left male on the right these guys are endemic not just to the Galapagos but to the island of Hena Vesa so they're not found even anywhere else in the Galapagos you can only see them in Hena Vesa so that was a treat to see a couple of them and then the large and medium ground finch you can see the bill especially the large ground finch there is no mistaking that for anything else the big honking bill almost the size of his head and then the red-footed boobies when we got back to the ship there were a bunch of immature boobies perched on the railings on the top deck of the boat and again I was probably 10 or 15 feet away with a 400 millimeter they were more interested in watching us than we were in watching them they're just so curious and we found that everywhere we went the younger the animal the more likely it was to be fascinated by these two-legged you know what's that clicking sound you know as we're as we're clicking away at them there they just kept coming right up to see what we're all about that afternoon we rode along the cliffs in Pangas and our our objective was our first objective was to shoot red-billed traffic birds as they flew overhead our second objective was not to fall over backwards out of the boat while shooting the red-billed traffic birds overhead and I mean there were literally like eight of us in a in a life raft in a life boat with you know so you're wearing the the life preservers and you get the long lens and birds flying over your head and you're leaning back and all of a sudden it's like well don't fall so we did our best we didn't lose anybody so that was good and these guys are a lot smaller than the other birds that we've been seeing only about 18 inches their bodies and then that those tail streamers add another 18 inches so they're pretty pretty gorgeous to give you a sense of size there are a lot of frigate birds flying around as well as you can see how much bigger those are with their seven foot wingspan and Galapagos shearwaters another endemic species and much like their cousins the shearwaters that we have around here very true to their name right they fly really low and fast right along the water so I have a lot of really blurry pictures trying to get a focus on something that's you know shooting like a rocket at eye level thankfully one went overhead and I was able to snap that picture we went ashore in El Barranco and came across a short-eared owl this guy was about 20 feet off the path perched on a branch could not be any less impressed by 16 people and thousands of dollars of camera equipment clicking away never even opened his eyes at one point he gave us a big yawn I'm like all right time to go so we continued on the path and at the top of this cliff we found another shorty and this one was actively hunting so that was kind of cool to see so they looked just like the short-eared owls we have around here but they've evolved in a very different hunting style so here you'll see them kind of soaring over a marsh like a harrier sometimes with a harrier looking for voles these guys feed mostly on petrels little Galapagos petrels little birds that nest in the crevices deep in the crevices between the rocks so they've evolved their hunting style they just find a crevice and wait so in the top left you can see he was kind of least kind of surveying the whole area and then in the bottom right he was hunkered down and waiting he must have seen a bird either go in or come out and he was waiting to pounce we didn't see him catch anything but it was really cool and then the frigate birds frigate a frigate is a warship right so they're they're that's how they got their name they're actually referred to by a lot of people as the pirates of the sea they don't hunt they don't fish they don't scavenge they steal food from other birds um and you can see in this picture the one on the top left kind of at 10 o'clock has a Galapagos petrel in its mouth and the other ones were all mobbing him trying to get him to drop it so they could grab it and he probably stole it from somebody else and they just passed around till someone finally eats it um overnight we motored back down to Santiago and we spent the morning on at Aegis port and the afternoon at Buccaneers Cove so there's a quick look at our agenda Aegis port is a beautiful black sand beach tons of sally lightfoot crabs and also quite a few marina guanas we spent over an hour on this tiny little short stretch of beach um and for me I was just I was losing my mind like the juxtaposition of these brightly colored crabs on the black rock and the black sand was just amazing the most amazing compositions I have hundreds hundreds of pictures like this I'll just I'll stop at five or six um and most of the crabs I'll tell you we're pretty solitary um if if one got too close to another the first one would just move away um there were a couple of exceptions a couple of couples that looked like they're recording um the middle picture on the on the right the bigger one is the male the smaller one is a female um most of the solo crabs if you moved too fast or made a noise or got too close they would scurry away these two you could have sat down right next to them and they would not have moved they only had eyes for each other it was amazing little love connection happening um we got there right as the sun was coming up so we got some great silhouettes this is a brown pelican um diving for fish and the brown knotties I'll show you what they actually look like in in a little bit but um they basically swim alongside or dive alongside the pelicans and try to steal fish out of their mouth when they come up so a lot like the frigate birds they're very opportunistic um and another endemic bird a lava heron this one I was I was literally taking a picture of that crab I think I showed you that the picture was on a previous previous life and this lava heron just photo bombed me and so fast came and went just scurried across so fast I didn't even know what it was I didn't realize I had a new bird to like get back to the boat I thought it was another yellow crown night heron um so a lava heron looks a lot like a green heron around here but um lava heron is the species and then our first really good looks at marina guanas um and again the silhouettes at sunrise were fantastic um these guys are also kind of not as big as the land iguanas mostly in the two to three foot range um but I guess the size varies by island so some islands have bigger versions and others have smaller most of the ones we saw were in that two to three foot range um they can grow to be more than four feet and weigh 25 to 30 pounds so again the size of my dog which is crazy um anyone know what a group of iguanas is called so we get a congress of eagles a murder of pros what do you think a group of iguanas is called a mess m e s s yeah no for real for real a plus monica a mess of iguanas and whoever came up with that name knew what they were talking about uh they're really funny so here's one swimming across a tide pool they haul themselves out and immediately are not graceful they're super clumsy first thing they do is blow the salt out of their noses and then they find a spot to kind of haul out on the rock and when I say find a spot they're not super discerning it doesn't matter if there's already an iguana occupying that spot they just kind of step all over each other climb all over each other lay all over each other they don't move it's kind of funny so I think mess again is is kind of the right word we also saw some galapagos fur seals on this stop they look a lot like sea lions especially when they're wet they're kind of shiny and sleek but they're a little smaller they have shorter snouts and when they're dry you can really see the difference especially in the lower left they're kind of shaggy and furry and they tend to run you know light tan to dark brown super cute very not and not quite as playful as the sea lions I have to say so miscellaneous birds we saw in that area too a couple of American oyster catchers I love the way they laugh you hear them before you see them but there's no mistaking what that bird is right a couple of smoothbilled ani that are related to I guess they're in the cuckoo family and yellow warblers and the yellow warblers interestingly sound exactly the same as the yellow warblers we have around here but they've got a little chestnut cap so they look a little different he's wet he was raining that day so he was he's a mess I have some better pictures coming up and more of Darwin's finches again more small and ground uh small and medium ground finches and our first common cactus finch and you can see that real specialized beak on this guy kind of long and hooked to help him feed on cactus getting in between those spines beautiful land iguana I mean I'm not an iguana person I'm not a lizard person but man this cat was gorgeous sitting on a piece of driftwood and he knew it too he was working the room he had paparazzi on every angle he kept turning his head like here get my good side it was really funny and a couple of butterflies and a fritillary landed nearby I actually skipped the snorkel excursion that first day they said it was murky we weren't going to see anything but one of the other workshop participants Howard sent me this video of a black-tipped reef shark that he got that first day with his GoPro they're about five or six feet long so they're not huge and supposedly they're curious and very docile so nothing to be concerned about if you see a reef shark heading your way in the afternoon we took another pangoride along Buccaneers Cove and then we landed on Espumia Beach which was really fun we saw our third species of booby in the Cove the Nazca boobies these guys are the largest they're about three feet tall with a five or six foot wingspan they're like gannets don't they related to gannets again the only way about between three and five pounds so you know the blue footed nest in the sand in a scrape in the sand the red footed nest in trees these guys nest on bare ground usually near rocky cliffs so our best looks at the Nazca boobies were usually from the pangas we went around through this Cove and saw a couple of fur seals and we watched this particular pair have the same conversation over and over and over again so the younger male in the water kept approaching the female on the rocks and we couldn't it was some debate whether it was a romantic overchair or maybe last year's offspring looking for a handout hard to tell but either way she wanted nothing to do with him and she kept telling him and he kept coming back for more he would not be deterred here's a look at the brown naughty and again some fantastic camouflage on this guy right blends in so well they're like oh there's some brown naughties we're like where where you know right in front of your face but just blends in perfectly with the rocks that he calls home they're in the turn family about a foot and a half tall maybe with a two and a half three foot wingspan and again they're the ones that try to steal the fish out of the pelicans mouths then we landed on espamea beach and we were hoping and hoping and hoping that we would see some marine turtle hatchlings and sadly we did not we're at the very end of the season we did see evidence that trail was a trail left by marine turtle that came ashore to lay eggs and it was actually part of it was below the high tide line so we know she was there in the last 12 hours and you can see how she kind of went off to the right they probably didn't provide enough cover so she swooped around went off to the left when actually the trail went into the trees and then came back out to the water so there probably were some eggs back there and they're probably hatched the next day knowing my luck a little further down the beach there were dozens of blue-footed boobies fishing right off the shore and they're the best swimmers of the three they're the only ones that can dive into shallow water the the nasca and red-footed boobies would be feeding much further out to sea these guys put on a show to rival any air show i've ever seen the synchronized diving you can see the lower right five of them hit almost in a perfect straight line all at the same time it was it was just incredible to watch we were standing in the surf you know ankle ankle deep shin deep shooting right up till sunset we were there probably an hour until they told us we had to leave you can see i started with one over eight thousands of a second i was i was determined to stop action and then as the light was fading i had to keep slowing it down so i could see so towards the end i was at one over 2500s of a second crazy to see here's another angle the undercarriage angle i call this one you can see those beautiful blue feet they look like fighter jets don't they flying information and then right at the very end they just unfold their wings so and they go in like a spear and they hit the water at about 60 miles an hour crazy here's another angle these guys were sidelight from the sun you can see their mouths open so interesting behavior they they don't they're not like osprey or eagles that see a fish and go in and pick up a fish these guys dive into a school of fish sardines anchovies mackerel flying fish and so when they find a school of fish they holler until all the other boobies hey they're over here so that's why their mouths are open they're actually calling come on come on and then they they dive in groups of anywhere from three to five to eight at a time and interestingly they eat what they catch while they're still under water so by the time they hit the surface they've already swallowed whatever they ate so there's no brown knotty going to steal the fish from a blue-footed booby that's not going to happen and then when we ran out of light i couldn't resist the silhouettes were just beautiful i love that beautiful sunset so many beautiful sunsets it was really really quite striking next morning we did another pangoride this time around vincente roca point um and we had a couple of snorkeling excursions that day and then we popped over to fernandina for the afternoon and the morning started off kind of slow by galapagos standards a lot of repeats we were getting a little anxious like more brown knotties more blue-footed boobies more marina guanas okay we've seen all those things what else you got um and then we went into this little cove and we saw our first galapagos penguin super cute he was molting so he was kind of a little bit of a mess um i have some more lots more penguin pictures later but this was a huge like bucket list moment for me so i had to show had to share that picture and then our first flightless cormorants which are really interesting um a really interesting example of how evolution works right so if you think about the galapagos there are not a lot of land-based predators there they've got fur seals and sea lions and feral cats that's all they have to worry about on land and the sea lions and fur seals are much more of a threat in the water so these guys had to be better swimmers than flyers and and big chunky wings impede your ability to swim so they've evolved to the point that their wings are about the third of of the size that would be needed for a bird that big to fly they're completely flightless they use them to balance when they're on the walk walk in on the rocks and they use them a little bit to steer when they swim but they're about three feet tall um which is stubby stubby little little wings so pretty cool example of evolution at work um and speaking of land-based predators we actually saw a feral cat we were super excited i'm not a cat person but but man a feral cat in the galapagos we were shooting away clicking clicking clicking and talking for five or ten minutes and then somebody said what'd you see in the galapagos a cat and then we're like oh yeah this is kind of stupid isn't it um but we had tui in our boat and she said you know it's it's not all that common to see them they are truly wild animals it's not somebody's house cat there's no people anywhere near where we were um this this was you know several generations in a wild animal uh and she went on to say if you get a picture of a feral cat with a baby marina guana in its mouth that would be the money shot so i said hold my beer and got no i didn't say that i wish i had uh but a couple minutes later the cat you know it had been reaching into crevices and and came up with a baby marina guana so you know lucky us right place right time even the other boat didn't get to see it they were in the cove with the penguin and when we saw the cat so lucky day for me not so lucky day for the baby marina guana and then we went snorkeling in an area where they feed you can see how nutrient rich the water is all that stuff floating you can see how strong the current is um again this video is from Howard josh another workshop participant he he had a gopro on a long stick so even though it looks like he's right in the iguana's base he was a good uh five or six feet away and while the iguanas are feeding you there were also a couple marine turtles swimming around you can see how shallow the water is here they call it deep water snorkeling but that just means you get on and off from the boat it has nothing to do with how deep the actual water is that afternoon we went to espinoza point on fair nandina where we saw our first great looks at galapagos hawks very similar in size and shape to red tailed hawks it was actually a pair right over our heads in the tree and again hard to tell courtship or adult and offspring at first it was looking a lot like courtship and then the the one on the right started doing kind of begging type behavior it's like oh maybe that's the kid and the mother so again hard to tell he did keep flying back and forth screaming again another hint that it might be a juvenile bird so i'm going to go ahead and call this a juvenile galapagos hawk um and the the key field mark if you're in the galapagos and you see a hawk it's a galapagos hawk it's literally the only hawk that they have in the galapagos uh the reason we went to espinoza is because there's tons and tons of colonies i should say masses multiple masses of marina guanas hundreds probably over a thousand marina guanas um and again just all on top of each other larry moan curly on the top right i love the faces those little white they're kind of conical scales they're all different like the guy on the lower left he's got two coming down either side of his nose the one in the back has like sideburns almost the one in the lower picture it's straight down the middle of his nose and the facial expressions just kill me but again just on top of each other and oh boy that smell a couple pairs of yellow warblers you can see the female on the left and the male on the right and just that little little bit of a chestnut cap on his forehead super cute also saw some snakes and lava lizards and these fernandina snakes are endemic to um fernandina to the island um and lava lizards were on several of the islands that we saw they're small you know anywhere from six to maybe eight or nine inches snakes i have to say lizards and snakes again not my thing more into mammals and birds so if it is fur or feathers i'm in uh scales stingers you know wings without feathers not interested i'll put crustaceans in the middle because i was really fascinated by these and the place like it's literally crawling literally crawling with with sallylifer crabs and again is it courtship or is it territory you know who knows but this is what we we just watched them move like one from another and one would move and now this one's got to jump to another rock um and again big male two females i'll let you decide what you think is happening here she starts to scoot away and then she's like oh wait a second hang on and then she starts like stroking his leg and when i left them they were holding hands or claws and then i suddenly felt like i didn't belong there anymore so i left um love connection uh beautiful marine turtle kind of just hanging out on the sand not the kind of environment where they would lay eggs they like to go under some trees and get a little cover when they can uh she hung out for a little bit then turned around and waddled back i have video but it took her six minutes to go 20 feet so i'm not going to show that we don't have that kind of time um more flightless cormorants you can really see the stubby little wings but the same behavior right that you see in the double crescent and and gray cormorants we have around here kind of holding those wings out to dry after they've been in the water they're just significantly smaller wings and i'm assuming that they dry faster because they're so small the next day we didn't spend a lot of time on land at all we did a a crazy aggressive power hike in the morning we were up to the top of this volcanic hill and then back in an hour and a and then we were either in or on the water the whole rest of the day um did get another new species that morning it was the best part of the trip like every day it's like what new species am i going to see today um this day was a Galapagos flycatcher uh which was really cool and we saw some nesting flightless cormorants so again very similar postures and even that beautiful turquoise eye just like the double crested that we have around here and more penguins as that as promised more pictures of penguins i couldn't control myself these were taken from a panga along the along the rocks we didn't go ashore where there were penguins again these guys are endemic to the galapagos they're the furthest north that you'll find any species of penguin and then one of the smallest species of penguins they're only about a foot and a half maybe 20 inches tall and they weigh between six and 10 pounds generally and i couldn't help myself i had to take a lot of pictures every angle you know look to the left look to the right look at me flap your wings go for a swim look up look down look over your shoulder yawn scream whatever i couldn't i couldn't help myself um then we went around kind of where he's looking over his shoulder in the lower left the next cove we found another Galapagos hawk and another unlucky baby marina guana um and again these animals couldn't care less we were maybe 20 feet away in the panga of course we didn't go ashore but he didn't care he didn't care at all he was just enjoying his lunch uh another sally life of the composition again the black this one there was a cave behind him so that black background that just faded into nothing so gorgeous um the next day we landed on still in isabella landed on urbina bay and we saw our first giant tortoises which was really cool um but first a pair of land iguanas um and i like this picture because it shows some of the differences between the male and the female so as as usual the male is prettier uh more bright the orange one in the front is the male and they also have a spine those the little spiny things along their back go all the way down the back the female in the back is more drab um her spine's kind of stopped they only go between her neck and her shoulder and then they flatten out and the star of the show for this day was the galapagos giant tortoise and we actually saw two of them there was this big clearing at the top of this rise the bigger one kind of stayed in the trees i have a couple pictures they didn't they weren't that great he was probably around 500 pounds and they estimated about 50 years old this guy was smaller um maybe 20 years old was the estimate that we were given and maybe about 250 pounds so a little guy um they can live to be over a hundred years old in the wild and they can weigh over 900 pounds um the males typically average between six and seven hundred females between three and four hundred and again because he was young only 20 years old he was super curious and he kept following people and other animals around um he went for a little walk he was heading for you'll see in a second on the on the right hand side a little tail whip from a uh land iguana that was digging a nest a male iguana uh he was making a beeline for the iguana that's a turtle rushing by the way that's what it looks like um and the iguana decided he didn't want to get stepped on so he left then the turtle saw a twoy and decided he wanted to go say hello to her and when she realized that he wasn't gonna stop she backed away and then he turned and we were kind of off to the you can see where I was standing shooting this he came over to us so we all just kind of sat down and he was just fascinated by daisy's camera lens whether he thought it was water or maybe seeing his own reflection he just could not get enough and I haven't seen her photographs but I'm dying too because I'm sure they're amazing um and and because I was it became known pretty quickly that I was the bird nerd of the group so while this was all happening Andres tapped me on the shoulder and said there's a cuckoo so I ran um and we uh heard actually three of them and if you've ever tried to see a cuckoo you know how secretive and frustrating they can be um three of them are triply frustrating uh bopping around in the tree stank undercover and then finally one of them popped out for like 10 seconds I don't think I got two shots but I got it I got the shot um and then that afternoon we took another pangoride more blue-footed boobies I just love these guys they look fake I swear it's a real bird it looks like it's carved out of wood doesn't it especially the one on the left but it's real my hand to god it's real um and then more penguins this area was actually called penguin rock so I got some action shots and the guy jumping in the top right sliding down the rock stepping over the just like the iguanas walk all over each other the penguins stepped right up on the iguana's leg onto its back and over to the rock and the iguana never moved but you can see the difference in size right the penguin's about a foot and a half that's a good three three and a half foot uh iguana and more penguins they were these guys are um monogamous they made for life uh and we were lucky to see some courtship and some mating behavior so um little snuggles more penguin snuggles how cute is that more penguin snuggles more snuggles and I'll stop there because this is a family show um show any more than that um next day we went down to floriana and it started off slowly again by Galapagos standards actually by main standards we saw sanderlings we saw great blue herons we saw hermit crabs were like come on really but I mean the great blue heron and the hermit crab literally did not move we all walked in and dropped our bags on the on this beach right around this rock and when we were leaving we're picking up our bags I'm like oh look at her like literally dropped backpacks all around it and it never moved and the great blue heron was maybe 20 feet away just watching us the full time you can't spook a bird there if you try flamingos another bucket list item for me um they start out white uh this was a lagoon where there were tons of them flying and feeding the juvenile there just started to get his adult plumage um and the flying and the landing how a bird can be so graceful and so awkward at the same time I don't know how else to describe it it they just they're just weird looking I don't know the touchdown a three-point landing on the on the lower right or two-point landing I guess um some queen butterflies on the path on the way out of the lagoon uh picking up and putting down pollen and a beautiful yellow while we're just singing his heart out we heard him long before we saw him that afternoon we did another pangoride this was really cool we came across a sandbar with a flock of flamingos on it and again like with the tropic birds you know objective one get the shot objective two stay in the boat um the boats going up and down we're trying not to hit each other in the head trying to stay out of each other's shots worrying about composition because multiple birds right they're merging you don't want a two-headed flamingo um so trying to get a single bird or group of birds that aren't overlapping um worried about the horizon worried about your shutter speed I mean it was a lot going on um and with the boat going up and down sometimes we were shooting down on them like on the two pictures on the left we were at the crest of a wave shooting down and then the middle one and the one on the right we were almost shooting up at them and then the one on the top right was almost at eye level and that one reminds me of the Abbey Road album covers John Pauls George and Ringo crossing the road um here's a little video just to give you a feel for what it was like in the boat yeah not for the faint of heart you can see the waves crashing on both sides of the sandbar the tide was coming in so we stayed there for like an hour going they're gonna fly soon they gotta fly soon because the sandbar is disappearing but they didn't um this is one of my favorite shots that I took I have to say no mergers they're all looking at me no bird butts um all slightly different angles the horizon straight although I may have done that in Photoshop um it was a little crooked I will admit I did a little cropping a little leveling but for the most part uh that was it's one of my favorite shots from the whole trip the next day we actually went back to civilization so this entire time I didn't even mention this we had no self-service no internet we had no idea what was happening in the world this was the end of May beginning in June there's a war going on in Ukraine we had no idea what was happening was it over is still out you know no idea so the night of June 2nd we were within range of Santa Cruz that someone at dinner said I have a Santa Cruz and it was all exciting and we all spent the night you know touching base with friends and family um but June 3rd we went ashore on Santa Cruz and went to the Charles Darwin research station for the morning and then we spent the afternoon in town doing a little shopping and things um but the Darwin Center has a giant tortoise breeding center and they actually raise them in captivity until they reach an age where they can be introduced into the wild so that was kind of cool to see all different age um tortoises and we also learned about the two different shell shapes again evolution at work here so the the the dome tortoise the one on the right generally comes from islands where there's food that's readily available at ground level and then the saddleback their shell has evolved to enable them to reach up because there's not as much food at ground level they're feeding higher up so you can see the way their shells have evolved to allow them to extend their neck a little bit more so that was kind of cool lots of spiders lots of spider webs i was somewhat fascinated borderline obsessed with spider webs and do i i couldn't help myself and again not a spider person so i have tons of pictures of spiders i have no idea what kind of spiders they are every time i try to look them up online i get scheeved out and i have to stop i can't like look scrolling through pictures of spiders going i can't do this anywhere i'm gonna have nightmares so we're just gonna call them miscellaneous spiders and and move on um so a green warbler bench another exciting bird for me we were in a spot called Los Camelos which is in the Santa Cruz Highlands there's these two enormous sinkholes that were caused when like underground magma lakes collapsed or something i wasn't really clear on the geology of it but they told me there might be vermilion flycatchers so i was like oh hell yeah i'm in didn't see any vermilion flycatchers but we did get a green warbler bench so that was kind of cool um and then June 4th so now we're coming towards the end of the trip and i'm like what do we possibly see that we haven't seen yet well how about some cording albatross and newborn boobies and maybe go snorkeling with sea lions these birds were incredible to watch and again not phased by our presence at all very curious often looking right at us like you can see here we were talking before we went ashore about how great it would be to get a picture of those iconic eyebrows raised and uh this guy obliged which was very nice um they nest real close to the paths and when i say nest i use the term loosely they just lay a single egg on the bare rock wherever they happen to be and then they sit on it um they take turns incubating again they mate for life um but when they take turns it's for two or three weeks at a time so one one bird will leave and fly hundreds of miles away uh to go fishing and then when they come back it's quite the event it only happens i think they incubate um what i say here two month incubation so if they're gone for two two or three weeks at a time there's only two or three changeovers during an incubation so we were really psyched to get to see one um we were taking pictures of our females sitting on the nest when the male came back in and you can just see how affectionate they are rooming and kind of looking lovingly at junior uh about to hatch is pretty cool um so these guys are big um if you've never seen an albatross stuff to mistake it for anything else two and a half to three feet tall another seven or eight foot wingspan a little chunky six to nine pounds um and those that aren't on nests are courting actively and the courtship ranges from like 30 seconds where it becomes obvious that they have nothing in common and they go their separate ways to this couple that we watched for quite some time and the courtship dance is i'm going to show you a video in a second that's really cool but some of the things they do in the top right you can see they're both gaping so there's no noise they're just open their mouths and kind of stare at each other they're touching their bills they're circling their bills and they're clicking together it almost sounds like they're fencing there's some mooing going on that sounds like cows at some point um head nodding all kinds of stuff but it's super choreographed so when one bird makes a move the other one responds the same way every time so i'll show you this a little windy sorry about the wind noise but so there's the bill circling a little more circling now it's the other one's turning to moo a little head bobbing and they do this thing called clapping which the one on the right's about to do and the one on the left goes into a preening posture so now you're going to see the one on the left black and the one on the right will tuck his head and start to pream it's really something else this went on for a long time and again we were maybe 15 20 feet away i sorry she's got to get the last word uh and again i shot that with my iphone no no expensive camera equipment required um as promised newborn blue-footed boobies you can see on the far right that the shell is still there uh two chicks underneath that bird the one on the right was still wet so obviously he had just hatched within the last couple of hours they hatched about four days apart we call it asynchronous um hatching so the one on the left was probably about four days old at that point and then one of my favorite blue-footed booby shots with the flying fish in his mouth isn't that cool he was trying to flip it around so it would go down head first but it really looks like the fish is trying to escape doesn't it and then the mask of boobies um the one on the lower right sitting on a nest in the upper right line again you can see the other look a little bit like gametes a little bit like the masked booby too with that with that face um that afternoon one of the absolute highlights of the trip and when i was really kicking myself for not having an underwater gopro was snorkeling with sea lions and these guys were there were eight or nine at least maybe more super curious you can see again thank you howard for the video um right up into his gopro they're super slender mostly pups you can see another sea lion in the background playing with somebody else they come right up snap um go around behind you nibble on your swim fins it was really really amazing we're in the water for about an hour and a half with these guys um so again if you do have the opportunity to go to Galapagos get yourself either in underwater housing for your camera or get a gopro with a stick um so howard's video is much better than my video the next that night there were some sharks along the side of the boat and what they were attracted i assumed the vibration of the boat or the heat from the boat was attracting fish that they feed on there were a lot of sharks and we were very happy not to be snorkeling uh in this area does anybody know what a group of sharks is called you're going to mess with one of those i and again whoever come up with his name is a shiver a shiver of sharks yeah and then our last full day um a few more close encounters again with some juveniles especially this little nascar booby chick how cute is he he hadn't pledged yet we don't think all those downy feathers still but he was ready he ever it was super windy i'm going to play a video in a second but it's really loud because the wind was crazy and every time the wind would gust he would just open his wings and start flapping and you could tell he was just anxious to start to fly sorry about the noise but he had something to say and i want you to hear stomping his feet stretching his wings he just made a beeline for me and again i kept backing up backing up backing up but he uh i don't know if it was what i was wearing or what my perfume he just wanted to come over and talk to me um he was pretty cool and then the sand crystal there's like four different species of mockingbirds um endemic to the Galapagos this is the second one that we saw us on crystal mockingbird started out on the ground then flew to a tree you know we're doing all the right things six to ten feet away and then it flew to a branch directly over our heads so and started to sing um and i'll zoom out in a second you can see how close i mean it came to us we didn't get that close but literally that's not close and it didn't care that we were there uh more blue foot of boobies i love the chicks the chick video in the lower right you can see the difference in size for the difference um and that really establishes the brood hierarchy so brood chick always gets fed first um for the parents sort of when food is scarce the younger one is less likely to survive because it never gets fed first if they're trying to feed chicks that are all the same age and size they're going back and forth and no one's getting enough food so with this kind of brood hierarchy the bigger one at least gets fed the younger one if it's going to fail fails sooner and the parents can devote resources to it it's more likely to survive um painted locust again insects not my thing but fascinating by the color fascinating by the colors about three inches long they can jump 10 feet um they're they're super good jumpers super good flyers not great at landing they kind of just like hurl themselves and then you hear this thud um and if they bounce off you i can tell you firsthand it hurts because they're big um Galapagos first seals sleep anywhere this is something else i learned the one on the right i think is my spirit animal just like out cold on the beach and just the opposite these industrious little ghost crabs um tiny little things too they dig these rose sand and um you can see on the lower right who's coming out with a big armful i guess clawful of dirt and then they just throw it and that's where you get all these little look like those snowballs little sandballs all over the beach and then our last night on board very sad we made a few laps around roca leon dormido which means sleeping lion and if you use your imagination you can see the lion with its head on the left kind of tucked around right looks like a sleeping lion in where the sun's coming down that's a ferry that boat right there is a ferry just to give you a sense of size this thing rises about 500 feet out of the water it's huge and i guess it's like a tradition to go around with cocktails so we did um hot toddies these spice cinnamon rum drinks they were delicious um and then as you go around the rock it reveals a totally different shape from another angle where it looks like a boot and it's also known as kicker rock which is kind of cool and that little um channel between the two towers is about 60 feet wide so i thought that was kind of a beautiful sunset that night beautiful night uh frigate birds overhead the crescent moon rising it was really really beautiful um and i've gone way over an hour so we're gonna wrap it up here so just to summarize um you know my my feathers my birds 30 60s of birds 26 of them were lifers for me so that was super exciting 16 are endemic to the Galapagos in the fur column only three only three mammals in 11 days it's kind of mind boggling but fur seals sea lions and feral cats that's all they got the only other mammals they really have are bats but when you're when you have to be back you can't stay on land after sunset you don't get to see the bats um and then kind of my miscellaneous scales and shells and such i think that's what i called it another dozen or so between iguanas and snakes and crabs and turtles and i didn't even count this spiders that are going to give me nightmares so 11 days 11 000 photos i think was the final count um i appreciate the opportunity to share you know a couple hundred on with you tonight um and i'm happy to stick around as long as you guys would like if anyone has any questions thank you and we didn't rehearse this part bill how do you want to handle questions with well do you want to get the zoom ones on your laptop can you see the zoom questions on your laptop and we can maybe alternate the zoom people if they put questions in the q and a do you want to read that from your laptop but we can start if anyone has any here monica's got one they are yeah yeah yeah it's a seven or eight foot wingspan um yes yeah well we what the very first day we walked through um north seamore and they were nesting and they nesting groups you know there'll be like a little grove of shrubs and you know maybe a dozen nests and then you go around the corner and there's a dozen more nests and they're flying in and flying out the ones that weren't on nests were actively courtings you had the slide whistle and the it was crazy there were a lot of big big big birds out there yeah for sure yeah picture of the albatross no uh the question was about the albatross uh the head of the he was um or she i don't even know white bird with um black volcanic rock in the background that was kind of open shade so the sun was on the bird but there was no sun on on the rocks because of the angle yeah and then i kind of played with the exposure a little bit in um in photoshop if you look real closely you can see a little bit of rock in the background but i just made it as dark as i could so it would stand out thank you thank you it's one of my favorites yeah no night photography not allowed on the on land at night that would have been cool though anybody else any zoom questions though bummer okay okay hopefully i've got there most of it and if we need to i can do a quick record of recording first one yes the first day they said it's super murky and there's not a lot you're gonna see but it's good if you want to practice and i'm like i don't like practice so i didn't go they all came back going oh it was so cold it was so cold it was 72 degrees i'm like are you people trying to guess like me like the first day that i went in it was around 70 and i had a little shorty wetsuit but there are people in like with the hood and the gloves and you know full and i'm like really and they get in there going like don't come to main i mean we'd be swimming in just swimsuits if the water was this warm here but it did get colder i think by the last day it was in the mid 60s to upper 60s the humble current comes up from the Arctic and keeps it pretty cool yeah i mean we were in mostly shallow water i don't i don't think it was any more than 15 or 20 feet deep when i was in i only i only went on three i didn't have the gear i was kind of bomb about 30 000 that's what i saw i don't know how it's distributed i think most of it is on Santa Cruz the kind of central island but Santa Cruz doesn't yeah Santa Cruz has an airport and baltra has an airport baltra is not inhabited but it has an airport figure that out so uh yeah it's really interesting in baltra so from that we flew into baltra took a bus to the dock and then life boat to the tip top from keto by via guaya kill so it wasn't easy to get there i gotta tell you it took a minute we actually spent a couple days in keto first um to make whoops just to make sure that you know we didn't want to miss a connection after all that right so i think we had two nights in keto before we went out to the Galapagos and then one night in keto on the way back did you have a question COVID testing um the Galapagos was not requiring and Ecuador was not requiring we had to get tested to come home and we had to get tested to get on the boat because we were going to be in such quarters so uh we did it as a group and everybody passed thank goodness celebratory cocktail literally daisy's like i just got the email everybody's negative i don't know what i would have done i mean they they had plans you know if god forbid you test positive the hotel has a you know 150 a day and includes three meals room service they're they're ready if it happens but it would kind of stink because there's really no way to get to join up with them later you know you're you just missed your vacation if that happens so yeah i actually got on this trip because of COVID i um this trip was originally planned two years ago a friend of mine put her name on the wait list early in i think january and got on almost right away and she said you should put your name on the wait list i'm like i'll never get on i put my name on in march and like two weeks later they said we have an opening oh my god it's happening i had like two months to prepare when everyone else on the on the trip was waiting two years to go i'm sorry uh daisy jillardini she's a she's based in vancouver she's a conservation photographer she does mostly cold weather trips she goes to the Antarctic a lot she goes to svalbard a lot uh she doesn't like hot weather she was she and i were both like commiserating like the heat didn't like it at all um but yeah it was a great it was a really fun it wasn't the heat it was the humidity uh no it was the heat it it would get close to 90 some days usually i mean you can hear the wind on some of the videos it was pretty constant so it didn't feel that bad but you know we had rained almost every day a little bit at least a little bit yeah not a lot of baking in the sun so that was nice and good for pictures too most of them are really overcast really nice light they they did a good job yeah a little chilly you're very welcome my pleasure oh thank you