After a few days of tough seas, we finally met the Las Palmas pilot boat in the late morning. We stopped surveying when we met the pilot boat and headed for lunch. Just as we finished eating, the Captain announced the ship had cleared customs, the gangplank had been fitted and we could go ashore. I was ready to go as I had booked a hired car for the day, but now I only had the afternoon. Fortunately, I didn't have to rush to return the car as we were spending the evening in the port. It was a two mile walk to the car hire company, which was about the nearest firm I could find. It proved to be a team effort with three of the staff working to copy my documents and complete the paperwork and a fourth member of staff who brought the car out to me. It was time to head to the hills. Once you get out of the main towns, there are a lot of winding roads into the hills. Sometimes I was able to drive over a couple of hundred metres without having to go around a corner. Some of the roads were especially narrow, which was fine as I do a lot of driving on my local back roads. But I don't expect to go around a bend and find an articulated lorry heading towards me. Twice that happened and I had to reverse, once around a blind bend. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of traffic on these roads.
After about an hour of driving, I reached the high Pine forests. I had been worried that these might have been covered in cloud, but I drove through the cloud and into bright sunshine on my way up. I was heading for a camping ground in the forests called Bailico, which eBird had indicated was a good spot for the Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch.
The Pine forests seemed to have good numbers of Great Spotted Woodpeckers and African Blue Tits. After about ten minutes of looking, I found a nice male Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch.
After seeing the Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch, I still had a reasonable amount of light left in the afternoon. I decided to head down to some of the lower Laurel forests on the North side of the island. At one point, I took a wrong turning and due to the narrow roads, I couldn't find a safe place to quickly turn around. In the end, this was good as I saw some spectacular scenery before I found a turning place.
After a twenty minute of so drive, I had reached the Laurel forests around Valsendero. I was hoping to see some White-tailed Laurel Pigeons flying around. This is one of the two endemic Pigeons on the Canaries. I found a viewpoint over the Laurel forest, but I only had about twenty minutes before I needed to depart to return the car. Fortunately, it wasn't a Tick as I had seen all the endemic Canary species on my visit in 1994. That was until Blue Chaffinch was split into Tenerife Blue Chaffinch and Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch. I did get to see a few African Blue Tits and Canary Islands Chaffinches.
The Canaries are unique in the Western Palearctic in having more than one species of Chaffinches on some islands. There are the two species of Blue Chaffinches which occur in the high Pine forests of Tenerife and Gran Canaria. I'm assuming this is due to the Chaffinches arriving and adapting to live in the Pine forests which covered the islands in cooler periods of the Earth's history. As the Earth warmed up these Pine Forests retreated to the higher and cooler parts of the highest islands. They eventually evolved due to isolation into the two species of Blue Chaffinch. Assuming the ancestor of the Blue Chaffinch occurred on the other islands, they disappeared when the Pine trees couldn't survive on the lower, more arid islands or were out-competed by the Laurel forests. Much later, Chaffinches must have re-arrived from North Africa and again evolved into the widespread Canary Islands Chaffinch which inhabits the lowland Laurel forests.
I'm basing my Chaffinch arrival theory on what I can remember reading about Spangled Drongo species on Sulawesi in Indonesia. Most of the Indonesian islands only have one species of Spangled Drongo. But Sulawesi has two species, which are separated by altitude. The understanding was the high elevation species arrived first and they adapted to live in the higher elevation forest. At a later date, the second species arrived and colonised the lowlands.
All too soon, I had to head back to Las Palmas, which was still about an hour's drive away.
Fortunately, the car hire office was still open when I returned and they were good enough to drop me back near the ship. The ship had laid on a buffet and entertainment by the swimming pool for the evening.
The Spirit of Discovery departed for our next destination of Lanzarote in the late evening.