By: H. E. Corley Smith
André Brosset, the second Director, arrived from France early in 1962.The difficulties of those early days are illustrated by the fact that he was held up for three months in Guayaquil waiting for a ship sailing to the Galapagos. During his brief residence, Brosset pushed forward with the building activities and added a meteorological station. He continued Lévêque's efforts to assess the surviving animal populations but neither of them had the facilities or the staff to obtain reliable results. For instance, he was wrongly led to believe that the races of giant tortoises on Española and San Cristóbal were extinct. Nevertheless, his reports, while having little to contribute about the largely unexplored islands of Santiago and Isabela, gave the CDF Council the first comprehensive account of the wildlife situation.For lack of manpower and transport, his positive conservation activities were largely confined to Santa Cruz Island, where he concentrated on the promotion of a "strict tortoise reserve", to preserve the substantial population of perhaps 2, 000 giant tortoises that survived there. Some protection was afforded in this limited area by hunting the destructive feral pigs, though it was accepted that the hunting of goats had to be restricted to avoid depriving the local population of an important source of food. At that time it was man who was considered the chief predator of the tortoise, whether on Santa Cruz or the other islands.The fishermen killed adults for food and there was a lively pet trade in younger animals. The very tame Galapagos doves were hunted for food but the other birds were in less danger as they were only killed for target practice, whether by islanders or visitors. One bright feature was that Brosset could confirm Lévêque's estimate that, as well as plenty of sea lions, there were upwards of 500Galapagos fur seals, an endemic species previously considered doomed to extinction.He also investigated the situation of the endemic rice rats and concluded that, due to the introduction of alien black rats (Rattus rattus), the only survivors of the six recorded species were Oryzomys bauri on Santa Fe and Nesoryzomys narboroughi on Fernandina.
During these early years, the CDF's chief concern was the establishment of the station. Little time was left for active conservation and, indeed, with no clear notion of how much of the archipelago was to be protected, both the Directors and the CDF Council concentrated on such limited problems as whether to fence in the relatively small area of the Santa Cruz "strict tortoise reserve" in order to guard its population against poachers.