... magnificent is a mighty fine adjective ....

 when i first got to the galapagos islands, we took a ferry from the airport island baltra, over to santa cruz ... in the sky there were black enormous birds .... they seemed huge ... they were soaring more than flapping or flying ... they were astonishing in their hugeness but seemed otherwise unremarkable compared to being on a ferry and the sealions and the people and the warm breeze .....

gosh was i wrong!! these are called marvelous frigate birds ... and ideed, they are marvelous ... here below, is a female sitting on a tree on north seymour ... the females do the soaring ... they are looking for males to mate with ....

even from far above, the female frigates have no trouble spotting the males... they make themselves quite visible like this:

isn't that crazy? the magnificent frigate bird males puff up their necks, cheeks, waddles, sacks into bright red balloon-ness .... easily spotted from high above ... any interested female can spot if from miles away i'd think .... i believe, evolutionarily thinking, it is similar to the male peacock having a fancy beyond belief tail and displaying it when time to mate ... or is when the mood strikes? 

below we have a post mating cuddle ... for real ....

 here, let me put my wing around you .... now that my red balloon neck has .. um ... withered ... shrunken ... diminished ... accomplished what it meant to accomplish ....

then we have another frigate below ... sitting on his nest .. tending the eggs ....

so the males are care takers... below, there is a male with a baby .... how cute is that baby ....

a baby frigate bird is white and downy and oh so cute!! it can take up to four years for a frigate bird to lose all its down and become a full grown adult ... 

below is an adolescent that was sitting in our path ... he was alert and wary of us ... one of the few galapagos animals we saw that was leery of us walking closely by .... he might have only been worried about us stepping on him ....

 you can see that he hasn't yet grown his adult feathers fully .... adult feathers aren't the same as other seabirds ... in fact, their feathers aren't really good in the water ... for instance they never land on the water or dive into the water ... they skim fish off the surface ... or they dive bomb and harrass other birds to get them to drop the fish they've caught .... those poor little booby birds just don't stand a chance against one of these huge birds!