Isla San Jose and Beyond
The windy weather had blown itself out, and we awoke to a perfect morning for a sunrise photo shoot among the creamcicle reddish-orange and white “sandstones” of Punta Colorada.
After breakfast, we let serendipity take us on a trip up a desert arroyo. The sandy wash was lined with a garden of copal and torote, cholla and pitaya, palo blanco and palo San Juan, wild cotton and purple nightshade. A gray-spine-topped old man’s cactus watched our passage.
Overhead, black check marks of turkey vultures teetered on rising thermals against an azure sky, and a peregrine falcon streaked past. The three-note call of the tiny verdin ricocheted through asparagus stalks of agave, while black-throated sparrows sang a sweet song to the sun. White-throated swift laughter cascaded from above, and a flash of brilliant crimson revealed a male cardinal.
The rising heat soon brought out the reptiles. Zebra-tailed lizards sprinted down the wash, tails held high and curved above their backs – reminiscent of a scorpion’s posture. Chunky chuckwallas peered out of cracks, ready to inflate themselves if molested. Atop a dioritic boulder sat a spiny fence lizard dreaming of a fence. A sleek, striped whiptail poked its head among the pebbles and leaf litter sniffing out invertebrate prey, and suddenly a desert iguana scooted in and out of view.
We found our first snake of the trip – a handsome gopher snake clad in rich browns, burnt orange, and black wrapped around the green spiny-edged leaves of an agave. A little farther on someone spotted a rattlesnake, but it disappeared under a rock before the rest of us arrived…probably to the relief of most of us, and the snake.
In the afternoon, we were again at sea in search of marine creatures. A shy humpback whale was noted, but we turned to sail toward a distant group of active, splashing dolphins. Our quest was interrupted, without warning by two very rare cetaceans – a dwarf sperm whale and a pygmy beaked whale. Very little is known about their life history, understandable considering that they are almost never seen. Remarkable that we were lucky enough to see not just one, but two such rare beasts in this vast ocean.
We finally reached the exuberant pod of what naturalist Jack Swenson called magnificent dolphins – in truth short-beaked common dolphins which, despite their name, are not all that common. They leapt and flipped, rode our bow wave, and put on quite a show. The photographers went just as wild and shutter flutter was coined. After film and pixels were exhausted, we took a break to listen to naturalist Lindy Hopkin’s Sonoran Desert talk that inspired us to perspire more on our desert walks.
The setting sun sank beneath the ragged crest of the Baja peninsula turning a mixed sky of mackerel clouds and smudges of gray into pink ephemeral fluffs. We will see what serendipity brings us tomorrow in this land of desert kissed by the sea.
The windy weather had blown itself out, and we awoke to a perfect morning for a sunrise photo shoot among the creamcicle reddish-orange and white “sandstones” of Punta Colorada.
After breakfast, we let serendipity take us on a trip up a desert arroyo. The sandy wash was lined with a garden of copal and torote, cholla and pitaya, palo blanco and palo San Juan, wild cotton and purple nightshade. A gray-spine-topped old man’s cactus watched our passage.
Overhead, black check marks of turkey vultures teetered on rising thermals against an azure sky, and a peregrine falcon streaked past. The three-note call of the tiny verdin ricocheted through asparagus stalks of agave, while black-throated sparrows sang a sweet song to the sun. White-throated swift laughter cascaded from above, and a flash of brilliant crimson revealed a male cardinal.
The rising heat soon brought out the reptiles. Zebra-tailed lizards sprinted down the wash, tails held high and curved above their backs – reminiscent of a scorpion’s posture. Chunky chuckwallas peered out of cracks, ready to inflate themselves if molested. Atop a dioritic boulder sat a spiny fence lizard dreaming of a fence. A sleek, striped whiptail poked its head among the pebbles and leaf litter sniffing out invertebrate prey, and suddenly a desert iguana scooted in and out of view.
We found our first snake of the trip – a handsome gopher snake clad in rich browns, burnt orange, and black wrapped around the green spiny-edged leaves of an agave. A little farther on someone spotted a rattlesnake, but it disappeared under a rock before the rest of us arrived…probably to the relief of most of us, and the snake.
In the afternoon, we were again at sea in search of marine creatures. A shy humpback whale was noted, but we turned to sail toward a distant group of active, splashing dolphins. Our quest was interrupted, without warning by two very rare cetaceans – a dwarf sperm whale and a pygmy beaked whale. Very little is known about their life history, understandable considering that they are almost never seen. Remarkable that we were lucky enough to see not just one, but two such rare beasts in this vast ocean.
We finally reached the exuberant pod of what naturalist Jack Swenson called magnificent dolphins – in truth short-beaked common dolphins which, despite their name, are not all that common. They leapt and flipped, rode our bow wave, and put on quite a show. The photographers went just as wild and shutter flutter was coined. After film and pixels were exhausted, we took a break to listen to naturalist Lindy Hopkin’s Sonoran Desert talk that inspired us to perspire more on our desert walks.
The setting sun sank beneath the ragged crest of the Baja peninsula turning a mixed sky of mackerel clouds and smudges of gray into pink ephemeral fluffs. We will see what serendipity brings us tomorrow in this land of desert kissed by the sea.
