it causes huge mortality. and other ones, you know, they fledge a lot lighter and smaller than they ought to be. that is a horror story. in the papaya use to attract them. so she lives out here trying to save birds she can barely see from flies she can barely catch. what do you say to someone who things, well, there are 13 other kinds of finches in the galapagos and maybe there s others we haven t discovered and this saul pais all part of the cycle, some survive and some don t. why is it worth all your time and money to save this one little bird? because it s sort of humanity s problem that s up to us to solve. we broke it, we should fix it. yeah. heading off the first man-made mass extinction seems like a thankless task.
journey home. over the years, the goats ate just about every plant of isabela and the tortoises began to starve. so desperate to save them, the ecuadorian government brought in carl, who knew exactly what had to be done. you used sharp shooters in helicopters. we did. snipers just instituting tens of thousands of goats a year. it was a lot of hard work. in the beginning, it was easy but if the galapagos taught us anything it s that animals adapt. the goats eventually realized that the sound of a helicopter means death from above, and they learned to hide. so carl adapted by strapping radio tracking collars on several female goats in heat, the so-called judas goats led the last survivors right to the snipers.
it s the kind of bird that hides deep in these swampy mangrove jungle gyms on isabela. how can you tell it s amman donndon abandoned from here? okay. oh, the mangrove finch. did you hear that? toot, toot, toot. that s a good sign all right. they say completely hidden during our hike. but here s footage from francesca s team. not only are these birds threatened by rats but in the 1950s a random load of cargo brought a certain kind of fly to the galapagos, a fly that feeds on the little beaks of baby finches. it s sort of like a horror story really, that the fly lies its eggs in the nest, then the first larval stage enters the nasal cavities of the nestlings, so a lot of the birds die.
stick. that s how naive they are. they didn t know to fear man yet. they didn t know how to fear anything. they don t have any predators out here. and there s maybe 90 left in the world. in the world total. this is one of the world s rarest birds for sure. i ll explain why this little guy is hanging on by a thread in just a minute, but to understand how carl plans to save them, we have to back up, hop over to isabela island and get to know these guys. galapagos is an old spanish word for tortoise. and for takes tortugas muw grande were the plodders of this island. by munching brush, they keep the whole ecosystem in balance happily living to 150, 200 years old in giant tortoise heaven. that is, until people showed up. in whaling boats and pirate ships. shortly after yelling land ho
catching one poor iguana repeatedly chucking it into the wave to see if it would come back to the same spot. it did. but modern science just discovered something more fascinating. they can shrink and go. so if there s not enough algae basically an adult sea iguana can shrink one third of the side. really? like anatomically get smaller? the world s only sea-faring lizard is the only known species that can contract and expand its own bones. so they may actually hold a key to curing human bone disease. wouldn t that be amazing that if the cure for osteoporosis was inside these goofy looking guys. one of the big secrets. yeah. but they only live in galapagos. and along with their land-based