Isla Santa Cruz:
Baby giant tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Center. These babies are part of a captive breeding program, being raised until they are too large to be eaten by introduced predators like rats and cats. These youngsters were about the size of grapefruits.

Lonesome George. This is the last surviving individual of the subspecies of tortoise from Isla Pinta. The research center has been trying to encourage him to mate with females of a closely related subspecies, but George is too shy. Since tortoises live so long, he probably has many more years ahead of him, but the future of his race is uncertain. We were lucky to see him out in the open part of his enclosure, since he usually hides in the bushes.

A female giant tortoise at the research station, with a "saddleback" shell, which is curved up at the front. I don't know the subspecies.

Our tour group and some full-sized male tortoises of various subspecies. The tortoise on the right decided to mount the one on the left shortly after this photo was taken, but I didn't upload any of those photos...

A lumbering tortoise. This one also has a "saddleback" shell. The name "Galapagos" comes from an old Spanish name for a saddle which was curved up in a similar fashion.

The vegetarian finch: one of Darwin's finches, this finch subsists mostly on fruit rather than seeds or insects.

Vermillion flycatcher. We have this bird in the States, but I've never seen them before. This is probably one of the most beautiful species of flycatcher in the New World. This photo was taken in the forested highlands of Santa Cruz, where we also saw the famed woodpecker finch (which our guide lured out by imitating the call of a female woodpecker finch). This male finch wasn't doing his amazing "bird using a tool" routine, but he was working his way along a twig, tapping at it with his bill, acting more like a nuthatch or a real woodpecker than a finch. Seeing a bird like that in action really makes you marvel at just how much nature abhors a vacuum, and how, over time, it manages to fill every gap with even the most limited of resources -- in this case, one species of finch. (Another thing worth noting: most woodpecker finches I've seen photographed have pale bills. The one we saw had a black bill, which indicated that it was in its breeding colors.)

A giant tortoise in the wild. Tortoises migrate to and from their breeding grounds every year, and we found this male (and several others) in a lush forest near a large ranch.

A house in Puerto Ayora, one of Galapagos's only towns, as well as a snag with two frigatebirds on it.

A female large ground finch. "Large" indicates the size of the beak rather than the entire bird. These birds can crunch seeds that smaller-beaked finches cannot, thus reducing competition between the species and creating diversity.

A lot of finches. This was at the house of the mother of Jacqueline de Roy, the mother of one of the most famous photographers of the Galapagos. Over time, Jacqueline has trained the local ground finches to eat bread crumbs and rice from her hand (which isn't legal in most of the islands, but she lives here, after all). You can't tell the species apart too well in this photo, but there are small, medium and large ground finches in it. The males are black, the females and juveniles are streaked.

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