Sally Lightfoot crabs are perhaps the most ubiquitous creatures in the Galapagos Islands. They are found virtually everywhere on rocky coastlines. They are also found crawling over marine iguanas, up the backs of sea turtles and under resting sea lions. As for the name, I offer this explanation from answers.com: “According to antique seamen’s lore, Sally Lightfoot is a night club dancer in the Caribbean. Although wearing hardly anything to cover her divine body, her dress is bright and colourful, red, orange and yellow. By profession, her movements are light and swift. A quick step sideways to avoid the odd hand snatching is her specialty. After months at sea and rounding Cape Horn, sailors anchor at the Galapagos Archipelago to take in fresh water. Brightly coloured crabs, red, orange and yellow, abound at the beach. High on their legs they move swiftly sideways. There is no doubt in any sailors mind; this is Sally Lightfoot.”

Just when I was starting to think that the cloud forest was only going to grant me insects, birds and frogs, this guy appeared. It’s called a tayra and it’s in the mustelid family (weasels, otters, ferrets, etc.) I had caught a glimpse of one before in Bolivia but wasn’t able to get any photos. That fleeting encounter had immediately put it at the top of my must photograph list. They are pretty rare to see in the thick forest, and easily spooked so I was very excited to not only see one, but two (this adult and a juvenile, which I’ll upload in a future post). Tayras are all around athletes, being expert climbers and leapers when in trees, fast runners while on the ground and excellent swimmers.

In the cloud forest of Ecuador I was able to photograph about a half dozen different species of hummingbird. This one is called the brown Inca hummingbird. I used a fast shutter speed (1/1600th of a second) and flash to freeze the motion of the wings. Depending on the species, hummingbirds can flap their wings between 12 and 80 times per second.

This is one of my favorite underwater photos from the Ecuador trip. We were swimming with the sea lions and they were moving into and out of a shadowed area caused by a nearby cliff. Whenever they went into the dark area I was getting pretty slow shutter speeds due to the lack of light. Knowing this, I tried panning with their movement as they swam below me. On this particular exposure, I was able to keep the focus point on the sea lion’s head to get sharp focus on the eyes while blurring out the colorful background.

I got engaged this weekend so thought it fitting to find my favorite two lovers from our recent trip to Ecuador. These two exceedingly attractive marine iguanas seemed to fit the bill. Here’s to romance in all its many forms.

We saw a grand total of one flamingo in the Galapagos Islands. They number only 500 total in the entire archipelago so I guess that’s not too bad. The Galapagos flamingo is thought to be a separate subspecies of the greater flamingo. I was hoping for this one to fly or do something interesting, but ultimately I had to settle for a ground level reflection shot as it waded in a shallow lagoon feeding on algae and plankton.

Our Ecuador trip wasn’t just to the Galapagos Islands. We also spent three nights in the cloud forest on the mainland. Basically, the cloud forest is where the Amazon rises up to meet the Andes. Clouds bump into the sides of the mountain and have nowhere to go so they just sit there. Everything is always wet, and therefore, very green and lush with vegetation. I was in search of all the exotic wildlife that lives in this region — pumas, ocelots, spectacled bears, etc. I knew that I was in for trouble when the first thing our guide asked was if I liked bugs. For the most part, that’s what we saw, bugs, until a surprise visitor on our last day (but that’s a story for a future post). For now, I present one of the great bugs of the cloud forest. This is a giant green leaf insect. It was about six inches long, oddly handsome, and a dead ringer for one of the stars of the animated movie “A Bug’s Life.” Unfortunately, this was the last photo ever taken of this poor guy. About ten seconds after snapping the shutter (while I was changing lenses) a hawk swooped down and ended it all. R.I.P. my little green friend.

This is a Nazca booby, the second of the three species of booby that I photographed in the Galapagos Islands. Often referred to as a masked booby (although it has recently been classified as a separate species), the Nazca booby is the largest of the three species. They typically lay two eggs, several days apart. If both eggs hatch, the older chick will push the younger chick out of the nest leaving it to die of thirst or cold. The parent will not intervene and the young chick will eventually die. It is believed that this is some sort of insurance policy in case one of the eggs gets destroyed or eaten or never hatches. This mother appeared to have only one egg in her nesting area as she leaned forward to get a better look at my wide angle lens.

A little something different today — behind the scenes footage from another traveler on our boat. He used his GoPro camera to get this video of me photographing a Pacific green sea turtle (actually, I think I kind of got in his way while he was trying to photograph the turtle). The final frame of the video is the moment that I snapped the photo below.

There are three species of boobies in the Galapagos Islands, the Nazca, the red footed, and the blue footed booby. Of these, it’s the blue footed that everyone comes to see. Their feet are actually a sexually selected trait, with both males and females preferring mates with brighter feet. The courtship dance is one of the most comical in the bird world, with mating pairs lifting their feet to display to each other. Unfortunately, mating season had just ended so we didn’t see the dance, but we did see plenty of the blue feet coming in for landings and flying through the air.