Visit to the Enchanted Isles

The Galapagos are fighting for their survival

Lying astride the equator in the Pacific Ocean some 600 miles off the coast of South America, the Galapagos Islands are a fabled natural wonderland--of giant tortoises, dragonlike iguanas and birds so fearless that they ignore the approach of a human. Old Spanish explorers called them Las Islas Encantadas (the bewitched or enchanted islands). It was here, among the exotic flora and fauna of the isolated islands, notably their startlingly varied finches, that the young Charles Darwin found the key evidence for his theory of evolution. Yet these unique biological enclaves, long despoiled by pirates and passing sailors, are still under attack. Thousands of peering, prodding, picture-taking tourists now visit the Galapagos annually, at considerable risk to the islands' frail ecology. To assess the damage already done to this irreplaceable showcase of evolution, a UNESCO team visited the islands this month. TIME Associate Editor Frederic Golden was with the group and sent this report:

Our guide was quite firm. "Please don't annoy her too much," he said as we approached a blue-footed booby that had decided to nest directly in our path. But even the guide, a serious young Australian biologist named Bob Close, could not resist the temptation, along with the rest of us, to poke a camera right in the face of the comic bird with the garishly colored webbed feet. The booby blithely continued to sit on her two eggs while the cameras clicked away. Said Close: "You would think that after having hundreds of tourists parade by them they would have learned to pick a more secluded place to nest. But they really seem to like the ground when it is all scuffed up by our feet."

Other creatures on the islands do not always take so kindly to human intrusion. When we moved toward a well-worn rock that had long ago been staked out by sea lions, a huge bull came huffing toward us and made it all too plain that he wanted us off his favorite perch. Our retreat was a prudent move; a few weeks earlier, a German tourist who insisted on holding his ground lost a leg to another enraged bull. The visitors can also inflict damage, even when they have the best of intentions. Biologists on Santa Cruz, one of the 13 major islands in the archipelago, were mystified recently when some of the iguanas they were studying stopped producing offspring. A little investigation provided the explanation: handouts from kindly tourists at a dock were drawing so many iguanas to the site that breeding territories were being broken up.

It is to protect animals and tourists alike from just such mishaps that Ecuadorian authorities have begun to impose strict regulations under the legislation that has turned most of the 3,000-sq.-mi. territory into a national park. Before visitors arrive from the mainland by boat or the twice-weekly plane, they must now get their proposed itineraries approved by park authorities. Once they are on the islands, they must stick closely to the marked paths laid out for visitors, always be accompanied by a trained guide and never touch, feed or molest the animals. Explains the park system's dedicated 26-year-old director, Miguel Cifuentes: "There is a place for humans in the Galapagos, but they must be integrated into the natural system without being permitted to overwhelm it."

Unfortunately, the islands have a long history of being overwhelmed. For centuries, passing ships freely helped themselves to the resident galapagos (Spanish for tortoises). Stacked in a ship's hold, these great beasts, which often weigh more than 500 lbs. and live for a century or more, can survive for a year without food or water. Thus in the days before refrigeration, they were an ideal source of fresh meat aboard ship. At least partly because of the sailors' depredations, three or four subspecies of tortoises were wiped out and still others threatened with extinction. In the late 19th century, the slaughter was extended to seals and sea lions, highly valued for their skins and furs. Even the chubby little Galapagos doves did not escape the carnage, since they were easy to catch and provided a tasty free meal.

More recently the killing has been done in the name of science. As late as the 1930s, zoos, museums and other institutions were carrying off shiploads of endangered species, many of which wound up as stuffed skins inside display cabinets. World War II also took its toll. Largely out of boredom, the U.S. servicemen who built and manned the airstrip on Baltra took potshots at iguanas, eventually making them extinct on that island. Some of the other assaults on Galapagos fauna and flora have also come through man's thoughtlessness.

Built up from the ocean floor millions of years ago, the islands are little more than volcanic rocks--"heaps of cinders dumped here and there," wrote Herman Melville. Despite the desolate appearance of the Galapagos, their isolation and the severe shortage of fresh water, intrepid colonizers have been trying to settle on the islands since the 19th century. The results were usually unsuccessful, and the settlers perished or fled. Even so, some of their animal companions--goats, cats, dogs, donkeys, pigs and, of course, the ubiquitous rat--remained behind to thrive, compete with and prey on the native wildlife.

Lately, humans too have secured a permanent foothold. A handful of the homesteaders are Americans and Europeans who were drawn by the dream of a simple, Gauguin-like life away from civilization. Most, however, are Ecuadorians from the mainland who engage in cattle raising or other types of farming. Even though these settlers are largely limited to the three islands with some fertile areas --Santa Cruz, San Cristobal and Floreana --they now number more than 5,000, including several hundred Ecuadorian navy and air force personnel.

This population explosion has complicated the job of Cifuentes and his 50 park wardens. Some residents have angrily objected to the shooting of pillaging goats; they insist that the animals are part of their food supply. Indeed, one embattled fisherman secretly planted several goats back on an island after Cifuentes' marksmen had finally managed to eliminate these animals there. No less exasperating is the effort to keep residents from bringing in new grasses and trees for grazing land and timber. For example, balsa trees, introduced by settlers, are crowding out the more fragile--and uniquely local--native plants within the parkland. Rats have also become stubborn pests. Only on the small island of Bartolome have traps and poisons made any real inroads against the durable rodents.

In the past, Ecuador lacked the inclination, the money or the manpower to do much about its priceless island territory, except to establish occasional penal colonies there. But in 1962 it got some badly needed international assistance with the opening of the Charles Darwin Research Station near Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz. Staffed by resident and visiting scientists, largely from the U.S. and Europe, the station has conducted intensive investigations into the ecology of the islands and is now waging a major campaign, in collaboration with the Ecuadorians, to save endangered species. Darwin scientists have begun a tortoise-breeding program, raising them until the age of six or seven. By then the animals are large enough to fend for themselves against dogs and other predators and are released into the wild. Howard Snell, a young Smithsonian Peace Corps volunteer from San Diego, Calif., is conducting a similar iguana-rearing project.

Impressed by these activities, officials in the far-off Ecuadorian capital of Quito are showing a growing new pride in their island possession. Schoolchildren from the mainland are now regularly shuttled over on tours, during which they are told about the special place of the Galapagos in the history of biology. The Galapagans, too, are becoming less blase about their heritage; the main street in Puerto Ayora is named Avenida Charles Darwin. Cifuentes, meanwhile, is making plans to extend the park area to the teeming coastal waters around the islands, which are chilled and fertilized by the cold Humboldt Current. Indeed, he sees the Galapagos as a kind of laboratory for the future in which man and beast harmoniously share the same wild habitat. Says Cifuentes: "Humans can live in the Galapagos, but they must do it in a boldly different way--without pollution, without despoliation, without any of the dreadful mistakes of the past."

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