The brujo: the little red bird Santa Cruz is trying not to lose

It fits in the palm of your hand and weighs less than a letter. The male has a head and breast of a red so intense it looks lit from within, and when it darts between branches you need a second to believe what you saw. Scientists call it Pyrocephalus nanus, the little vermilion flycatcher. In the islands, it has always been the brujo, the sorcerer.

Fewer than a hundred are left on Santa Cruz. The Charles Darwin Foundation’s latest counts put the island’s population at somewhere between 30 and 50 birds, nearly all of them in the highlands near Los Gemelos. This is their story, and if you want to see one, how to do it without disturbing it.

A bird found nowhere else

The brujo is endemic to Galápagos: it lives nowhere else on earth. Charles Darwin collected specimens in 1835, during his visit to the islands, and the ornithologist John Gould described it a few years later. It is about 13 centimeters long. The female is more understated, grey-brown above with a pale salmon wash on the belly.

It hunts insects on the wing. It perches on a low branch overlooking a clearing, waits, shoots out, snaps something from the air and returns to almost the same spot. That habit matters for understanding what happened to it, because it needs open space beneath the trees to hunt.

A genetic study published in January 2026 by Charles Darwin Foundation researchers found at least eight distinct lineages of the brujo across the islands, each isolated from the others for a very long time. In the years ahead, some of them may be recognized as separate species or subspecies.

What has been lost

It once lived on twelve islands. Today it is found on ten. San Cristóbal had its own form, Pyrocephalus dubius, which has not been reliably seen since 1987 and is considered extinct. It has also disappeared from Floreana.

On Santa Cruz, home to most of the archipelago’s people, the decline has been steep. Where it used to be a common sight in the island’s humid zones, the population is now so small that every nest counts.

When a population is this small, every breeding season is lived one nest at a time.

Why it vanished

There is no single cause. Several add up:

• Invasive plants. Blackberry and saúco, brought by people, carpet the floor of the Scalesia forest and close the clearings where the brujo hunts.
• Introduced predators. Rats and cats, which never existed in the islands, take eggs and chicks.
• A parasitic fly. Philornis downsi, known as the avian vampire fly, lays its eggs in nests. Its larvae feed on the chicks’ blood.

How it is being brought back

Since 2014, the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galápagos National Park Directorate have worked together to save the Santa Cruz population, and since 2018 they have followed every breeding season closely. The work is slow and hands-on: pulling invasive plants hectare by hectare to give the forest back its open understory, restoring Scalesia, and setting out dispensers of treated nesting material that the birds use to build their nests, which helps hold back the parasitic fly.

It is working. In 2024, 15 chicks fledged. In 2025 there were 39, from ten pairs, the best season since monitoring began. Researchers have also seen pairs settling in freshly restored areas near Los Gemelos. The population is still fragile, but for the first time in a long while it is heading the right way.

Where to see it

On Santa Cruz, your best chance is Los Gemelos, two large volcanic sinkholes on either side of the road that crosses the island, about twenty minutes by car from Puerto Ayora. A short trail runs through the Scalesia forest. Go early in the morning, walk slowly and watch the low branches that face open ground. With patience, and some luck, you will catch a flash of red.

On other islands it is easier. In the highlands of Isabela, for example, it is seen more often, and it also lives on Fernandina and on some of the smaller islands visited by cruise boats.

A few simple rules go a long way:

• Stay on the trails. The restored understory is exactly where they nest.
• Don’t play recordings of its call to draw it in. It stresses the bird and pulls it away from its nest.
• Keep your distance and don’t linger near a nest.
• Clean seeds and mud off your shoes and clothes before moving from one area or island to another.

If you would like to help directly, the Charles Darwin Foundation runs a program to adopt a little vermilion flycatcher that funds this work.

After Los Gemelos

Los Gemelos sits on the way to other highland stops: lava tunnels, reserves where giant tortoises roam free, coffee farms. We put together a simple route for half a day in the Santa Cruz highlands. And once you come down out of the mist, coffee is waiting in Puerto Ayora.

Figures from the Charles Darwin Foundation (2025 and 2026) and Galapagos Conservation Trust.