Bahia Magdalena / El Barril
After a calm night, literally sleeping among the whales, we awoke in Bahia Magdalena to the splendor of another beautiful morning. The breeze was calm and chilly and the horizon was adorned with the fleeting breaths of gentle giants. Legions of birds moving to their feeding grounds were also visible in the distance, Brants geese landing inside the bay and cormorants and pelicans flying out to the open Pacific Ocean. We went one more time to take a closer look at the gray whales. Cows were exercising their calves against the current created by the tide going out of La Boca. The calf in the picture behaved playfully, and while surfacing, it opened its mouth making its baleen visible!
On the sun deck, lunch was served while we sailed through the Hull Canal, or as it is named in Mexico, Canal de Soledad. Spectacular sand dunes surrounded us as we cruised to a place called El Barril, a mangrove ecosystem where our Zodiacs can navigate through shallow waters that support an incredible diversity of life forms. Inhabitants of this environment range from invertebrates to juvenile stages of marine big game fish. Here we gained an appreciation of both the complexity and the importance of these wetlands and how they are linked to a complete chain of biological processes. Bird life is quite numerous too; white ibises, willets, night herons and many other birds were sighted. Some of them were feeding on the partially exposed sandy bottom of the bay. We could see how they used their diverse beak designs in different ways. Each species of bird fed at a different depth under the wet sand as it sought invertebrates. Finally, a rainbow surprised us at the end of the day as if Bahia Magdalena gave us her farewell wish for a good trip back home.
After a calm night, literally sleeping among the whales, we awoke in Bahia Magdalena to the splendor of another beautiful morning. The breeze was calm and chilly and the horizon was adorned with the fleeting breaths of gentle giants. Legions of birds moving to their feeding grounds were also visible in the distance, Brants geese landing inside the bay and cormorants and pelicans flying out to the open Pacific Ocean. We went one more time to take a closer look at the gray whales. Cows were exercising their calves against the current created by the tide going out of La Boca. The calf in the picture behaved playfully, and while surfacing, it opened its mouth making its baleen visible!
On the sun deck, lunch was served while we sailed through the Hull Canal, or as it is named in Mexico, Canal de Soledad. Spectacular sand dunes surrounded us as we cruised to a place called El Barril, a mangrove ecosystem where our Zodiacs can navigate through shallow waters that support an incredible diversity of life forms. Inhabitants of this environment range from invertebrates to juvenile stages of marine big game fish. Here we gained an appreciation of both the complexity and the importance of these wetlands and how they are linked to a complete chain of biological processes. Bird life is quite numerous too; white ibises, willets, night herons and many other birds were sighted. Some of them were feeding on the partially exposed sandy bottom of the bay. We could see how they used their diverse beak designs in different ways. Each species of bird fed at a different depth under the wet sand as it sought invertebrates. Finally, a rainbow surprised us at the end of the day as if Bahia Magdalena gave us her farewell wish for a good trip back home.
