As soon as I set foot on Genovesa for our first hike, I realised that the rule about staying two metres away from the wildlife was going to be difficult to follow. Juvenile red-footed boobies – dressed in a uniform dull brown – circled above us and squabbled below, practising their take-offs and landings to a soundtrack of shrill squawks. Their gregarious turquoise-beaked elders perched in bushes like strange fruit, gripping the branches with their red webbed feet and preening their feathers atop their nests, apparently oblivious to our presence.
Swallow-tailed gulls with their vivid red-ringed eyes picked daintily through the shallows, but it was our guide that pointed out the earth-coloured short-eared owl, perfectly camouflaged in the midst of the island's rocky highlands. Unfazed by the arrival of the paparazzi, the bird occasionally swivelled its head 180 degrees to give us a long, hard stare as if in rebuke for interrupting its hunt.
Nesting next to the trail were handsome Nazca boobies, dubbed the lone rangers of the Galápagos for the distinctive black 'face masks' that adorn their snowy white plumage. They lay two eggs but typically only one hatches as both parents opt to incubate the stronger-seeming egg. And as we cooed over the fluffy white chicks being shaded from the equatorial sun by their mother's bodies, we learnt that the largest booby species hides a dark secret – a penchant for paedophilia.
"If both parents leave the nest to forage for food, some adult boobies seek out the most vulnerable chicks and subject them to sexual and physical abuse, before pecking at its neck meaning that it often dies from an infection," our guide Karina explained. It certainly put a new spin on the survival of the fittest.
Giant tortoises, one of the archipelago's star attractions, have also survived against the odds. In 1535, an envoy of the king of Spain deemed the islands too inhospitable to be interesting, but he was followed by 17th-century buccaneers, whalers and seal hunters who made use of the handful of islands with a fresh water supply, while decimating the giant tortoise population for sustenance.
Today, the conservation efforts of breeding programmes and the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz are redressing the balance. And although the world-famous giant tortoise, Lonesome George from Pinta, never produced any offspring while in captivity, unsung hero Diego - a centenarian and counting from Espanola - has fathered more than 800.
On the large seahorse-shaped island of Isabela, we encountered one of these gentle giants in the wild, lumbering along at a leisurely pace, stopping to tug at some vegetation with its wide mouth; so close that I could make out the folds of skin on its neck, the rings on its shell and its dust-covered claws, while I could only imagine what its small but curious eyes had witnessed over the last century.