A big thank you to everyone at Profile Books for all their support with The Galápagos, particularly the late Peter Carson, Andrew Franklin, Penny Daniel, Rebecca Gray, Anne-Marie Fitzgerald, Cecily Gayford, Sarah Hull and Michael Bhaskar. Thanks to George Lucas of InkWell Management and to all the attentive folks at Basic Books, notably Thomas Kelleher, Sandra Beris, Tisse Takagi and Elizabeth Dana.
I’d like to express my gratitude to all institutions and individuals that contribute to www.archive.org. This is a tremendous resource, giving access to so many old and often rare books, which takes a lot of the slog out of writing a book like this. There are two books on the Galápagos that I have found a particular inspiration: Evolutions’s Workshop by Edward J. Larson is a brilliant account of the history of science in the Galápagos, and Darwin in the Galápagos, by Thalia Grant and Greg Estes re-creates Darwin’s movements through the archipelago in unbelievable detail, exploring these islands’ importance to his thinking. I am also indebted to John Woram for creating Las Encantadas (http://www.galapagos.to), an absolutely fabulous website full of Galápagos-related texts and images, to John van Wyhe and colleagues for Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk), a super resource for leafing through Darwin’s published and unpublished writings, and to Jim Secord and colleagues at the Darwin Correspondence Project (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk). For more recent scientific journals, I relied heavily on Ben Norman of John Wiley & Sons, who pinged over dozens of PDFs on all sorts of obscure subjects. Apart from reading a lot, I have benefitted from the wisdom of many people, including Randal Keynes, Swen Lorenz, Ole Hamann, Alan Tye, Fritz Trillmich, Gabriele Gentile, Patricia Parker, Karl Campbell, Julia Pooder, Matthew James, Gisella Caccone, James Gibbs, Stephen Blake, Fausto Llerena, Joe Flanagan, Patricia Jaramillo, Washington Tapia, Charlotte Causton, Graham Watkins, Mark Gardener, Samantha Singer, Peter Quintanilla, Marilyn Cruz, Hugo Echeverria, Luis Die, Desiree Cruz, Santiago Bejarano, Rachel Dex, Richard Montagu and Jemma Pearson. In particular, I’d like to express my extreme gratitude to Thalia Grant, Gregory Estes, Tim Birkhead, Linda Cayot, Felipe Cruz, Rashid Cruz, Dennis Geist, Conley McMullen, Christine Parent, Marta Tufet and Mark Wilson for taking the time to read excerpts, sample chapters and, in several cases, a draft of the entire book. In spite of all this help, any errors contained between these covers are obviously my own.
In my capacity as editor of Galápagos Matters, I am fortunate to have the support of all those at the Galápagos Conservation Trust in the United Kingdom, including Ian Dunn, Jen Jones, Pete Haskell, Victoria Creyton, Isabel Banks and Leah Meads, not to mention former colleagues Leonor Stjepic, Toni Darton, Abigail Rowley, Kate Green and Nicholas Moll. Over at the Galápagos Conservancy in the United States, it is a pleasure to work with Johannah Barry, Linda Cayot, Lori Ulrich and Rebecca Fuhrken. Lori Ulrich contacted several members of the Galápagos Conservancy who kindly gave permission to reproduce the most wonderful photographs in the colour section. I’d like to give a special mention to all those at Island Conservation (especially Heath Packard, Karl Campbell, Erin Hagen, Brad Keitt and Nick Holmes) for helping me research a feature on rat eradication I wrote for Helen Pearson at Nature (some of which I’ve worked into this book).
Thank you to all my friends and family, especially my parents John and Stella, Tom and Ana, Mary and Mark, Hugh and Sheila, Zaid and Kate, Matt and Marisa, John and Sara, and the Celeriac XI. But it’s really Charlotte who deserves the greatest thanks. Without her love and support, this book simply wouldn’t exist.
If you would like to find out more, visit my blog at the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/science/animal-magic), show that you ‘like’ the book on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/TheGalapagosByHenryNicholls), or follow me on Twitter (@WayOfThePanda).