Magdalena Bay
Having spent a couple of days in the northern section of Magdalena Bay, the National Geographic Sea Lion made her way south to explore the mangrove environment more closely. At first light, the ship headed south in Hull Canal and witnessed birds and dolphins during the morning. The ship anchored in a place known as El Barril where two very different environments meet, sand dunes and tropical mangrove plants. This is where our “hunt” would begin. The definition of hunt being; to search or seek out with intent to capture, but we would be capturing with pixels and film and not physically capturing our quarry. The animal of the day was the mangrove warbler, a rare bird which is a subspecies of the yellow warbler found in the mangroves of the Baja Peninsula. The tide was falling and with it our opportunity to find the small yellow bird, which is territorial. The males have a reddish head and they will come out of the mangroves to see what all the noise is in the waterways, the noise being our boats and their occupants. The glimpses were brief, but satisfying, as the small bird made his way among the branches, chirping away at us in a brave attempt to drive us off.
Throughout the rest of the day, we made our way south to look for gray whales and other charasmatic megafauna in the waters of Magdalena Bay, but it was the mangrove warbler that captured our imaginations this day.
Having spent a couple of days in the northern section of Magdalena Bay, the National Geographic Sea Lion made her way south to explore the mangrove environment more closely. At first light, the ship headed south in Hull Canal and witnessed birds and dolphins during the morning. The ship anchored in a place known as El Barril where two very different environments meet, sand dunes and tropical mangrove plants. This is where our “hunt” would begin. The definition of hunt being; to search or seek out with intent to capture, but we would be capturing with pixels and film and not physically capturing our quarry. The animal of the day was the mangrove warbler, a rare bird which is a subspecies of the yellow warbler found in the mangroves of the Baja Peninsula. The tide was falling and with it our opportunity to find the small yellow bird, which is territorial. The males have a reddish head and they will come out of the mangroves to see what all the noise is in the waterways, the noise being our boats and their occupants. The glimpses were brief, but satisfying, as the small bird made his way among the branches, chirping away at us in a brave attempt to drive us off.
Throughout the rest of the day, we made our way south to look for gray whales and other charasmatic megafauna in the waters of Magdalena Bay, but it was the mangrove warbler that captured our imaginations this day.
