They call it Bird Island, and the nickname barely does it justice. Step off the panga at Darwin Bay and the sky overhead is not empty - it is moving, flickering, full of frigatebirds with scarlet throat pouches inflated like balloons, red-footed boobies perched on mangrove branches, and Galapagos storm petrels so numerous the air above the cliffs looks blurred. Genovesa Island sits at the far northeast corner of the Galapagos archipelago, a low crescent of lava about 5.4 square miles in size, so remote that most cruise itineraries do not attempt the overnight crossing to reach it. For the ones that do, Darwin Bay turns out to be the crown of the flooded caldera itself, a half-drowned volcanic bowl where boats anchor inside what was once the throat of a volcano.
Genovesa is not the towering cone most people picture when they hear the word volcano. Its highest point rises only about 250 feet above the sea. The island is the rim of a volcano whose center collapsed and flooded, leaving Darwin Bay as a calm, protected anchorage ringed by cinnamon-red cliffs. Snorkel the bay and you are finning across the floor of a caldera. Hammerhead sharks patrol the deeper water beyond the reef, silhouettes gliding in the blue. Closer to shore, sea turtles browse the rocks while rays cruise the sand. It is the kind of place where the geology and the wildlife are not two separate attractions - the shape of the volcano created the sheltered breeding ground that made the island a seabird stronghold in the first place.
On the far side of the island, a narrow cleft in the cliff serves as the landing for what everyone calls Prince Philip's Steps - named for the British royal who came ashore here in 1965. Guides help visitors out of the panga onto wet rock, and then up a staircase cut directly into the 25-meter volcanic wall. At the top the trail flattens into an open plateau covered with low scrub and scattered boulders. Nazca boobies nest on the ground with the indifference of birds that have never learned to fear people. Great frigatebirds brood their single chicks in the palo santo trees. Walk the one-kilometer loop to its end and you reach the lava edge where storm petrels pour out of cracks in the rock in numbers so vast that short-eared owls have learned to ambush them in broad daylight - a behavior seen virtually nowhere else.
The Darwin Bay trail begins at a small coral-sand beach tucked against the inner wall of the caldera. Sea lions haul out here and doze through the heat of midday, oblivious to the visitors who must detour around them. The path skirts the edge of a mangrove stand and climbs to the top of the cliffs for a view back down into the flooded crater. Swallow-tailed gulls - the world's only nocturnal gull, found almost exclusively in the Galapagos - nest in the cracks of the lava. Red-footed boobies, the smallest of the three Galapagos boobies and the only one that perches in trees, decorate the mangroves like oddly-colored ornaments. Four species of Darwin's finches forage underfoot, their beaks finely tuned to whatever food the island offers.
Reaching Genovesa requires an effort that rules out day trips. The island lies about 90 kilometers north of Santa Cruz, past the equator, in waters that can turn choppy when the trade winds freshen. Cruise ships time the passage for night, so passengers wake up already anchored in Darwin Bay with the frigatebirds circling overhead. The remoteness is part of the reward. Because so few boats make the trip, the island receives a fraction of the visitors that San Cristobal or Santa Cruz see, and its wildlife retains the almost bewildering tameness that first astonished Charles Darwin when he walked among these creatures in 1835. On Genovesa the birds do not move aside as you pass. You move aside for them.
Genovesa sits at 0.32N, 89.95W, roughly 90 km north of Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos archipelago. The low, crescent-shaped island is best identified from the air by Darwin Bay, the flooded caldera cut into its southern side. The nearest airports are Baltra (SEGS) on Baltra Island and San Cristobal (SEST). Recommended viewing altitude is 2,000-4,000 feet AGL in clear equatorial conditions; the island is frequently partly obscured by the garua mist from June through November.