Lunch for a Swallowtail Chick

I'm back-blipping three images from my two-week Galapagos trip. We're in Puerto Ayora for an afternoon, the largest town in the islands, with internet cafes--one of which I'm patronizing.

This image is from Tower Island (called Genovesa by the locals)--a medium-sized island, isolated quite far to the northwest of the rest of the Galapagos islands. A pair of Swallowtail Gulls is feeding a squid to their very young chick at their nest (little more than a scrape in the sand). Since the squid is too much for the little one, the adult will take it (back) into its crop and regurgitate it later (hopefully in more edible form) to try again.

These beautiful gulls--black, white and grey with red trimming--are mainly nocturnal feeders, which explains their large eyes. Other notable species on Tower are great frigate birds, and red-footed boobies--the latter have a breeding colony of over 100,000 on this island, which is usually the only place where visitors to the Galapagos see them.

I'll start backblipping for the entire two weeks of the trip when I'm back on July 22nd.