Golden wonder

A fox shrunk to the size of a house cat; a super-sized - and super-blue - scrub jay; the fossil of a mammoth 4ft tall instead of the regular 16ft; a relic grove of pines from the Pleistocene era . . .

The words of Darwin came to mind as I stood at the bow of the motorboat Truth on a three-day expedition around the Channel Islands of California: "It would have been strange . . . if I had overlooked the importance of isolation."

Of course, the granddaddy of evolutionary theory was talking about his trip aboard the Beagle to the Galápagos, but he could have been referencing the weird and wonderful examples of dwarfism, giganticism and transmutation found on the cluster of eight islands in the Pacific, ranging from 11 to 60 miles off the southern Californian coast.

Formed 14 million years ago by clashing tectonic plates, they are home to 150 endemic species, including: the island spotted skunk, the night lizard, the Santa Cruz ironwood, the island bush poppy and the ashy storm petrel. The islands are also a sanctuary for brown pelicans, black oystercatchers and bald eagles, and the seas around them a haven for grey and blue whales, northern elephant seals and the occasional sea otter, thanks to the nutrient-rich waters.

I was itching to make landfall. "Before you get carried away, the Channel Islands are not quite as dramatic as the Galápagos," cautioned Ellen, a retired army nurse, also on the trip. "The islands don't offer the same exoticism, but a subtler interpretation of evolution in isolation. That's mainly because many of the endemic species are plants."

I decided to stick with Ellen for the rest of the trip. She'd been a good egg the night before when I'd arrived at the Sea Landing's dock in Santa Barbara.

A word of advice: don't arrive last and in the middle of the night when sharing a communal cabin on a boat. You inevitably get the bunk near the engine and searching around with your hands in the pitch dark in an effort to find it causes either huge offence or huge excitement.