... splash ....

at some point on monday, while snorkeling at bartholome, i was swimming alone ... i was closer to the beach than the rest of the family .... i was floating, studying some fish and a starfish ... trying to see if the fish even noticed the seastar ... i was relaxed, motionless, calm, happy, as serene as you can be breathing through a plastic tube ..... and suddenly i heard a ruckus to my right ... between me and the rocks .... i was sure it was a giant shark coming to eat me for the first five seconds ... then i decided that shark, if big enough to eat me, would have had trouble getting past a dozen snorkelers undetected .... so .. not a shark ... i still felt true fear ... fear of the unknown ... big slpash .. oh no ... adrenaline ... fight or flight? .... well duh, flight! .... and then i saw what it was ...

a pelican ...

it was a pelican ... the oh.so.frightening.disturbance in the water near me was a pelican ... it had dive bombed teh water jsut a few feet away from me ... yikes!! it could not have been a graceful effort at fishing .... i think where it dove was too shallow and it kind of crashed and belly flopped and then flailed about trying to recover ....

julia and i later in the day actually saw an errant pelican while we were out of the water ... it was diving into ocean and landed in a jumble in about a foot of water ... we really worried that it had broken something ... it looked that crazy ... it's wings were all akimbo and floppy after it crashed and was trying to set itself straight ...

are galapagos pelicans dumber than the average bird? you'd think they'd be quite skilled at judging where a good dive spot is .... we saw giant schools of fish that would have been easy picking for a bird with a big scoop beak .... or maybe it  was just trying to scare me .... ya never know ....