Pinta Island, also known as Abingdon Island, after the Earl of Abingdon, is an island located in the Galapagos Islands group, Ecuador. It has an area of 60 km² and a maximum altitude of 777 meters.
Pinta was the original home to Lonesome George, perhaps the most famous tortoise in the Galapagos Islands. He was the last known representative of the subspecies Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni.
Pinta Island is also home to swallow-tailed gulls, marine iguanas, sparrow hawks, fur seals and a number of other birds and mammals. The most northern major island in the Galapagos, at one time Isla Pinta had a thriving tortoise population. The island's vegetation was devastated over several decades by introduced feral goats, thus diminishing food supplies for the native tortoises. A prolonged effort to exterminate goats introduced to Pinta was completed in 1990, and the vegetation of the island is starting to return to its former state.
The elongated island of Pinta is the northernmost of the active Galapagos volcanoes. Pinta is a shield volcano with numerous young cones and lava flows originating from NNW-trending fissures.
On January 28, 2008, Galapagos National Park official Victor Carrion announced the killing of 53 sea lions (13 pups, 25 youngsters, 9 males and 6 females) at Pinta, Galapagos Islands nature reserve with their heads caved in. In 2001 poachers killed 35 male sea lions.
Famous quotes containing the word island:
“When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the “big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)