SANTA CRUZ, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador — There’s a red danger flag snapping in the wind at Playa Brava.  Michael Moreno stands in the soft white sand, his arms crossed, watching his class of young surfers sitting on their boards, waiting…

SANTA CRUZ, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador – The National Park rangers in khaki shorts and shirts were looking for nests of the endangered giant Galapagos tortoise in a patch of sunburned scrub brush and cacti.

Their job was to gather up tortoise eggs and take them back to the Charles Darwin Research Station here for protection and hatching. They heard faint scratching and nibbling sounds that day and they knew they were too late for at least one nest. A black…

SANTA CRUZ, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador – The peppy sounds of folkloric trumpets and drums and saxophones blared from the sidewalk café on Darwin Avenue, the main street of the town of Puerto Ayora. Young men and women in billowing blouses…

SAN CRISTOBAL, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador – The little beige sea lion pup mimicked the snorkelers in the chill, clear waters of Darwin Bay, blowing bubbles, doing flips, mirroring the swimmers’ twists and turns. Everyone was having fun. But then a larger sea lion roared and lunged. The snorklers scattered. It was the pup’s mom and the party was over. She was ready to go and the pup was going with her. Together they glided through the smooth, flat ocean water, barely disturbing the surface. The barking was over. The two of them had…

SANTA CRUZ, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador — The marine iguana, a coal-black, prehistoric-looking creature found nowhere on earth but the Galapagos Islands, is coping with some difficult times. Its population has declined by several hundred thousand over the last 15 years,…

A giant Galapagos tortoise, the size of an old-fashioned bath tub, sat in the morning shade at the edge of a muddy pond in the highlands of Santa Cruz Island. It pushed its angular head slowly out of its thick…

Kristen Mastropole was making her way into the center of a thicket of mangroves in the Galapagos Islands. She was wearing a long sleeve field shirt and khaki pants. It was her eighth day in the mangroves and she had the scrapes and cuts and bruises to show it. “I’ve already counted 17 bruises on my legs,” she said.

Mastropole is a University of Miami student conducting the first detailed on-the-ground study of mangroves in the Galapagos. She and the university hope her work is the beginning of a long-term project that could stretch over many years.

       If anyone at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference walked into Sarah Frias-Torres’ talk on Goliath Grouper Friday thinking that fish are not sexy, they walked out afterwards as converts.          One of five panelists at “Florida’s Iconic Critters,” a…

Despite the gloomy weather, I’m so excited to be here in beautiful Miami for my first SEJ conference. I’m no stranger to Florida nor Miami, since I’m based in Tallahassee and have made countless trips to the South both for…

Just as the snow had covered the surroundings of Tromsø, Norway,  my lawn has again turned green and the thermometer is rising again. Just a few years ago, we could be pretty sure about one thing: By mid-October the winter…