The Galapagos: A Natural HistoryBy Henry NichollsBasic Books, 2014Robert Bowman, a UNESCO ornithologist working in the Galapagos Islands in 1957, is quoted in Henry Nicholls’s sparklingly good new book The Galapagos as saying “No area on Earth of comparable size has inspired more fundamental changes in Man’s perspective of himself and his environment,” and the simple truth of the claim derives from the short stay made in the archipelago in 1835 by a disheveled young naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle named Charles Darwin. As Nicholls writes:

Charles Darwin will be a constant companion throughout. For those who do not buy into his views on the origin of species, this need not be cause for concern. The reason for paying special attention to Darwin is that his ideas have had a major impact on the way that humans see the natural world in general and the Galapagos in particular. Before HMS Beagle sailed into Galapagos waters in 1835, most visitors considered these islands to be some kind of godforsaken hell on earth. In its wake, perceptions began to change, and today the archipelago is widely perceived to be the closest thing we have to paradise. Darwin is crucial to the modern identity of the islands. If we ignore the significance the Galapagos held for Darwin, we will have failed to appreciate the true importance of these islands.

The cringing in that paragraph – the now-customary fawning on fundamentalist religious fanatics who don’t “buy into” the extensively-demonstrated scientific reality of evolution (otherwise referred to here as Darwin’s “views,” much as we’d refer to his “views” on the personality quirks of his pet cat) – is the kind of thing you’re told you have to do in order to sell a book to a broad audience in today’s atmosphere of hyper-watchful faith-extremism in which the mere mention of Darwin or natural selection must be accompanied by pre-emptive apologies. The wondrous change associated with Charles Darwin and the Galapagos isn’t that the animal life there – so isolated and yet so various – provided the key that allowed him to provide the first non-religious understanding in two thousand years of mankind’s place on Earth; it’s that his visit to the islands transformed them into an attractive tourist destination.But the bulk of the book itself is devoted to natural rather than supernatural apologetics; this is as fluent and ultimately joyful a celebration of the “Encantadas,” the enchanted isles at the far edge of everywhere. It’s not primarily a call to action: Ecuador made 97 percent of the Galapagos a protected national park in 1959, thereby arresting almost completely the industrialization (and consequent despoliation) that would otherwise have encroached upon it. Carefully-considered plans to reconstitute hard-hit species have been under way for decades, and the area’s hugely lucrative tourism industry is enlightened and strictly controlled. Nicholls warns against complacency, but he has a mostly optimistic story to tell.And the story keeps coming back to Darwin, of course. It was his experience with the many finch-species of the Galapagos that spurred his understanding of the working of natural selection, and it’s those tiny birds, each as small as a heartbeat, that are on the minds of the vast majority of the aforementioned tourists. According to Nicholls, this often leads to frustration, since the birds themselves (let alone their various sub-species) are tough to observe - and it’s a frustration shared by Darwin himself:

During his visit, Darwin found himself unable to make head or tail of the finches. ‘Amongst the species of this family there reigns (to me) an inexplicable confusion,” he confessed in his Ornithological Notes, written around nine months after he left the Galapagos. For anyone who’s ever been to the Galapagos and hoped but failed to distinguish one finch species from the next, it should be of some consolation that this was Darwin’s experience too.

Nicholls writes charmingly about the birds, and about the giant tortoises who are the island’s most charismatic inhabitants, and he covers the human history of the place with equal verve, tracing the ups and downs of a human population that’s had to deal with unexpected celebrity for over a century. The various ongoing conservation programs and scientific studies are laid out in fast-paced detail.The natural history of the Galapagos has been studied more thoroughly than the natural history of virtually anyplace else on Earth except perhaps the plains of Africa. The island chain sits at the crossroads of major oceanic currents, and it changes those currents too, and this produces clearly-demarcated ecological zones on the land, zones sometimes stacked right on top of each other, a few minutes’ walk by tourists who are always surprised by the vaguely science-fiction feel of the quick transitions. Far more familiar – thanks to countless nature specials on TV – will be the antics of the various animal inhabitants of the islands, including the giant marine iguanas that are found nowhere else. These lizards fascinated Darwin to such an extent that he famously spent an idle afternoon heaving one repeatedly out into the water, just to observe its swimming abilities. Nicholls descriptions of the non-aquatic behaviors of these iguanas are delightfully sprightly:

On any given island, being the biggest can bring big advantages. Large male are able to have more sex than small males. Intriguingly, though, small males are not entirely idle. It takes a male marine iguana around three minutes from penetration to ejaculation. The largest males are tough enough to repel the takeover attempts of other males and stay on top for this length of time, achieving ejaculation in over 95 percent of copulations. Small males, by contrast, are not so successful, getting dislodged by a larger male roughly once in every three mating attempts. Pint-sized males, however, have come up with an intriguing counter-strategy. They prepare what researchers have politely termed an ‘ejaculation-in-advance.’ It’s probably easier just to call it masturbation, though there is a crucial twist: a small iguana holds this ejaculation-in-advance in specialised pouches in his penis, shaving entire minutes off the act of coupling and increasing his chances of transferring sperm to the female before he’s booted off.

(Scenarios like this will be extra-familiar to some of Nicholls’ readers, sadly; change the species-name in the above passage, for instance, and you’ve got an average Saturday night anywhere in Donegal)When the Galapagos was designated as the very first World Heritage Site, in 1978, it was still a wild, virtually unregulated place; you could wander in it, and you could often be alone with your thoughts (and the faint murmur of finches). Only a few years later, that version of the Galapagos had been replaced by the rigorously-managed ecological theme park it is today, much to the place’s long-term benefit. Darwin would still recognize the place, although he wouldn’t be allowed to chuck iguanas into the ocean. And the thousands of tourists who visit every year clutch guidebooks in hand, hoping for a glimpse of paradise, or history, or both. Those tourists would all be well-advised to acquire copies of Henry Nicholls’ book as well. It’s quite the best thing of its kind ever done.