Feeding frenzy!

 

Saturday March 8

We started the day with a dawn zodiac cruise along a protected peninsula (Peninsula de la Gringa— a good location for International Women’s Day). We saw a number of shore birds and a pair of humpbacks. It was a beautiful calm morning with a lovely sunrise. It was just great to be out in it.  

After breakfast we returned to walk in the peninsula, again with great bird and whale viewing. When we returned to the ship, we discovered that we were in the middle of a huge and extended “feeding frenzy”.  The ship stayed in the same location in the bay for over two hours while the frenzy went on all around us. Photos cannot capture the immensity of the event, where boobies, pelicans and gulls dived in large groups for the fish beneath the surface. We learned that these birds have special adaptations to be able to dive at such high velocities that they stun the fish. Multiple pods of common dolphins participated in the feeding frenzy.  At times we wondered how the various creatures kept from crashing into each other. Some of the gulls would surround a pelican when it resurfaced, trying to steal a snack from the fish in its mouth pouch. After a while, gray whales and humpbacks also appeared. It really seemed that one humpback sought out the “flotillas” of sea birds and then came in to eat their seafood buffet. We watched the humpback disrupt at least four such parties before it moved on.

Later in the afternoon we went ashore at Baia de Los Angeles, and drove up into the hills to a forest of Boojum trees. Forest may not be quite the right word, as it was still desert and pretty barren in this dry season.

And the Boojum are more cactus than trees..  an endemic species of succulent that has leafy spines on the trunk and one or two branches high at the top. They are amongst the slowest growing of plants at a foot per decade. They look like something out of Dr. Seuss and are named from Lewis Carroll’s “the hunting of the snark”.  Their Latin botanical name means “peculiar column”. All a bit otherworldly. It was comforting to see a group of California quail, to ground us in the here and now! 

Pictured: gray whale fluke, to be added when bandwidth is better: feeding frenzy with pelicans diving and dolphins cruising, boojum landscape