在达尔文之岛，一个渔村少年成长为生态守护者
At seventeen, Mateo was a whaler’s grandson who knew the Pacific currents better than the archipelago’s official chart; his first morning as a guiding assistant on Santa Cruz Island left him drowning in a lexicon he had never owned — *Sula nebouxii* for blue-footed booby, *Amblyrhynchus cristatus* for marine iguana, and the precise distinction between finch species that Darwin had immortalised. The tourists, equipped with laminated checklists and waterproof binoculars, expected not just sightings but a narrative of evolution etched into volcanic rock, a story Mateo had lived but could not yet tell.
His mentor, a retired park ranger who had spent decades removing invasive goats from the highlands, insisted that factual recitation was hollow without an instinct for ecological interdependence; together they spent hours crouched over a *Scalesia* seedling, discussing how its survival hinged on the eradication of a single rodent species. Mateo learned to read the subtle signs of stress in an iguana’s colouration or the alarm call of a mockingbird, replacing the vague pride of a native with the analytical humility of a naturalist — yet his foreign visitors still posed questions he could not answer with confidence.
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