For this morning, we arranged an early sunrise party to San Esteban Island, which lies in the Midriff area of the Gulf of California. Facing southeast, the wide Arroyo Limantour is the best location to contemplate the sun rising over the mainland of Mexico. After breakfast, our guest and naturalists walked on the arroyo in search of the “pinto” or piebald chuckwalla, an endemic, “gigantic” version of the normal, mainland form of this lizard, and the spiny-tailed iguana, which constitute another endemic species. These iguanas climb up to the tops of cardon cacti to get the nutritious flowers and fruits. San Esteban has long been a very isolated island, and many of its reptiles and cacti are unique. Therefore it is regarded a “laboratory of evolution” by biologists. The waters around, though cold and with complicated currents, shelter a great diversity of marine wildlife too, so our expedition diver Maya ventured in the sea and captured this biodiversity with a submersible video camera. At noon, the National Geographic Sea Bird sailed north for the afternoon activities, and we encountered bottle-nosed and long-beaked common dolphins in the way. We anchored at Rasa, a little island that is the colonial breeding site for elegant and royal terns and Heermann’s gulls, and made cruises around it on the expedition landing craft. During these, guests and staff were enchanted with the number of nesting seabirds and their vocalizations (that filled the air and our ears with metal-like and laughing-like sounds). Dr. Enriqueta Velarde (a leading researcher and ornithologist of Rasa) joined us for dinner and made a presentation of her work on the island. We learnt a lot today and had a lot of fun!
2/25/2022
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National Geographic Venture
Port Lopez Mateos
This morning, National Geographic Venture docked at the interesting port, San Carlos. From the 1940s to the 1990s, the port was used for loading agricultural products and fertilizers from the nearby Santo Domingo Valley. Nowadays, San Carlos is basically a place for loading sardines from a local cannery. It is also an important tourist base for whale-watching, principally mating gray whales. At the port, all guests and staff boarded buses to Lopez Mateos, a town located near the northernmost tip of Magdalena Island. The buses traveled across Magdalena Plain, a section of the Sonoran Desert that receives a lot of moisture in the form of dense fog from the Pacific Ocean. Lichens and orchillas, a type of flowering plant, give the desert a phantasmagoric appearance. Guests and staff enjoyed spotting numerous birds, including crested caracaras and kestrels. Once in Lopez Mateos, we boarded local pangas for whale-watching. During two rounds of whale-watching, we encountered several whales close to our pangas. However, most of the whales were preoccupied with traveling, searching for mates, or just finishing their time of reproduction and thus exiting the lagoon. In reality, the whales were not interested in interacting with the boats and their excited cargo, but we had many opportunities to observe the behavior of these magnificent animals. In town, we all delighted in a delicious fish lunch, ‘pescado zarandeado.’ We enjoyed exploring the local dock with its many colorful shops and crafts, and we admired the wonderful sculpture of a cow-calf pair of gray whales.
