The Wisdom of Birds
October-November 2003
This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD
by Melesa Hamer
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The birds do it naturally. They know when it’s cold that it’s time to head south where the water is clear and the living is easy— it’s time to go to Mexico.
Taking our cue from the birds last winter, my partner Dave Snowberg and I paddled from San Felipe to La Paz, a journey of more than 1,200 kilometres—69 days of sheer Baja bliss. As we headed south down the coast, the water turned lighter and clearer, becoming aquamarine in color. By the time we reached La Paz, it was the same ultra-light shade of turquoise as my boat.
Wildlife abounds in the Sea of Cortez. At one point, as I dove to untangle my fishing lure from shallow rocks, a school of porpoise swam slowly around me. When we stopped paddling to watch whales feeding, five or more surfaced and dove around us. Their long, leathery backs glided along the water as we sat back and did a little feeding of our own, munching on granola bars.
Snorkeling, I spotted a sea turtle sleeping in the sand below me. He noticed me too and was gone before I had time to appreciate the moment as anything but a memory. We circled a small island, which is home to hundreds of sea lions. They swam around us doing somersaults and leaps, and we watched two bull sea lions battle it out like sumo wrestlers.
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On land, many other animals call this desert oasis home. Turkey vultures like to perch on the tops of saguaros in the dying afternoon light like a country Western cliché. They watched me as I checked out a massive sea turtle that had washed up on the beach. The vultures didn’t seem to mind the smell, or appearance. I think they actually liked him better that way.
One morning we awoke to find a coyote gnawing at something on the beach right outside our tent. A massive squid had washed up in the night and the coyote had found his breakfast. I heard the coyotes wander through our camp some nights and saw their tracks almost every morning. They were usually shy and skittish, so we didn’t often see them up close.
From the time the sun crested the horizon to the time it set, it was an ever-present force, charring the landscape—even the lizards took a mid-day siesta to escape the heat. The sun baked the green off everything but the saguaros; small animals scuttled under rocks to bury themselves like vampires in what little shade there was.
Out on the water there was no shade. We wore wide brimmed hats, long sleeve shirts and kept our legs covered from dawn until dusk, regulating our temperature by dunking our shirts in the ocean. My hands became cracked and wrinkled with the combination of salt and sun like the mud flats of Death Valley. We needed shade! Necessitamos sombra! La buena sombra.
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Baja has remained a sleepy little peninsula for years—Mexico’s forgotten stepsister. While the mainland became crowded and degraded, Baja lived a quiet, peaceful, simple life—until recently. But now Baja’s riches have been discovered, not just by developers, butby commercial fishermen and even the Mexican government.
Tourism is a big industry in Baja. The Mexican government’s proposed Escalera Nautica, or Nautical Ladder plan, would create new harbors along the Baja peninsula every 100 kilometres, eventually turning the barren coastline into a parking garage for yachts. Most of the sailors in the area, who have to pay every time they enter and exit a port of call, see this as simply a money grab. The $1.9 billion dollar Escalera Nautica would be the nation’s largest tourismdevelopment project since the tiny fishing village of Cancun was transformed into a resort city.
The marine life, which depends on the Sea of Cortez for sustenance and shelter, has had to pay the biggest price for living in these rich waters. Unregulated and over-fished, these waters no longer yield the bounty they did only ten or twenty years ago.
We saw a sad, little, doomed sea lion nuzzle up to nurse, a piece of fishing net stuck around its neck, the thin rope digging cruelly into its skin. Thousands of endangered sea turtles also die each year to feed a rampant black market demand for sea turtle products. And human impact has hit populations of lobster, sharks, oysters— basically all sea life in the Sea of Cortez.
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There is a silver lining to all this. Currently there is a proposal to make the area around Bahia de Los Angeles into a national park. Wildcoast, an international organization dedicated to the preservation of endangered species and threatened wildlands of Baja, is working to preserve large areas in Laguna San Ignacio, Bahia Magdelena, Bahia de Los Angeles, and Bahia Concepcion. The organization is also working with the US and Mexican governments to implement a sea turtle recovery program. For more information about conservation efforts in Baja, visit www.wildcoast.net.
Despite its problems, Baja remains a winter paradise. Certainly the weather was great on our trip. The water was often like glass, rippled only by the drops falling from our paddles and our wakes. We could see down through 25–30 metres of water to the white sand and kelp covered rocks and coral below.
We paddled past tiny islotes covered in saguaro cactus, a sure sign of the desert environment surrounding us even though we ourselves were immersed in water.
Like the birds, we continued south into ever-warmer waters, catching a free ride on the current ebbing out of the Sea of Cortez.
© Melesa Hamer is an avid sea kayaker and freelance writer specializing in environmental and outdoor stories. She is currently on assignment, backpacking in Peru, Bolivia and Chile for three months. Next April, she and her partner are planning a kayaking trip from Seattle, Washinton to Nome, Alaska.
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