Magdalena Bay & Pacific Cruising
Our day was a varied one. A group of early risers rode to shore before 6:00a.m. to walk and photograph the effects of early light on the endless shapes of dunes, long lines of commuting cormorants and the natural litter of the beaches.
After breakfast we toured mangrove-lined lagoons by Zodiac. Long-billed curlews and whimbrels foraged on the mudflats and tolerated our concentrated looks. Both species have down-curved bills. Young curlews look much like whimbrels except the latter have dark lines along the top of their heads, they are darker colored and slightly smaller. Black-crowned night herons, black-bellied plovers and black-colored cormorants stood under black, white and red mangroves. A dropping tide made it especially exciting for naturalists who tried to avoid shoaling on the muddy bottoms. A coyote wandered out of the mangroves onto a mudflat, watched us for a bit and ambled back in. How do they do that with such ease? Red mangrove root systems are so dense that the world record for a man in a 100-yard dash through the roots is 20 minutes and 30 seconds.
Our afternoon stop was at Punta Belcher on Magdalena Island. This historic point had been used as a pier before the much more substantial one was built at San Carlos, where we boarded the vessel. It may have also been used as a whaling station during the slaughter of gray whales earlier in the last century, but much of the iron has been cut up and removed as scrap, and no record remains of the whaling endeavor. California gulls perched on the sand by the hundreds, probably attracted by sharks and other fish waste produced by the fishing camp marked by about eight scattered and meager houses. This was all amongst old piers and ditches left over from an old phosphate-mine transfer station that was also here at one time. Some explorers walked past an active osprey nest without bothering the birds and made their way into the desert or stayed close the beach.
Magdalena Bay is protected by three large islands that have been carried here over 12 million years ago on a geologic plate that no longer exists. The islands were scraped off the surface as the plate dove or subducted below the western edge of Mexico. They represent the only areas of rock that have gone through change from high pressure or temperature, called metamorphism by geologists. We discovered serpentine and abundant quartz. One group found an endemic primrose, a Margarita rose, named after the island to the south. Immense bands of dead pelagic crabs lay scattered along the gravel beach, stranded by a higher tide. These creatures are bright scarlet in life and live in open water where they provide food for hungry birds and other predators. They look like a bit like tiny lobsters, and so are often called lobster krill.
The National Geographic Sea Bird cruised out of the entrance to Magdalena Bay and into the Pacific. We passed next to a group of over 200 common dolphins spread out around the ship. The light was fading as we looked down into the inky black water and watched them appear over and over again near the bow. That night we had a small following sea that gave us a very gentle roll, the kind that would put a baby to sleep in a few minutes.
