La Paz: Season Two

Magnificent Frigatebirds and Pearling

We’ve spent the last two days on the water, trying to dodge the sun and see as much as we can at the same time. 

It’s Monday and I’m sitting in the courtyard of the El Ángel Azul, our second accommodation, watching four Costa’s hummingbirds fight about rights to the feeder. The historical building, purchased by the owner 22 years ago, has been lovingly restored, and the gardens are stunning with various types of agave, cacti, palms and pineleaf penstamen that puts what I tried to grow in Ashland to total shame.

Before I get to birds and pearls, a little geological and geographical background is in order. It will be clear I’m no geologist, and my apologies to those that may happen upon this very basic and brief account.

During the Mesozoic period (230-63 million years ago), what some geologists call “The Big Squeeze” began. That’s when tectonic plates started to shift and drift and the North American Plate, on which the mainland of Mexico and the U.S. sits, began to move westward over the Pacific Plate, on which Baja and coastal California ride. The subduction caused magma to rise and uplifts in granitic rocks, creating mountains and basins throughout the U.S. and Baja (there are 23 mountain ranges in Baja).

Then in the Cenozoic period (63 million to present), “The Big Split and Rip-Off” occurred. The North American Plate once again overrode the Pacific Plate, and Baja and Coastal California began to slide farther north along fault lines, including the San Andreas Fault. Over tens of millions of years the continental stretch tore Baja from the mainland, opening up the mouth of the Sea of Cortez (or Gulf of California) about five million years ago. 

The San Andreas fault runs beneath the Gulf, and all the geologists seem to agree that the movement of the Pacific Plate continues, and some millions of years from now Baja and Coastal California will be an island. Our current president would probably be pleased if that occurred tomorrow.

For the time being, however, we have the stunning peninsula, and the Gulf, with its intoxicating aquamarine color. Baja is 806 miles long, and the Gulf is 669 miles long. If one drives, it’s 914 miles from Tijuana to La Paz, which indicates how those mountain ranges affect road building.

On Saturday we set off for the two islands just north of La Paz, Isla Espíritu Santo and Isla Partida. Ed and I were the only white English-only speakers in the boat of 26 people—an excellent opportunity for Spanish learning. Our guides spoke English, and two women from Tucson also spoke English.

At the San Gabriel Inlet

Arco de Partida

 

The day-long tour took us past numerous white sand beaches, some only accessible by boat, and many of those boats could only be classified as yachts—behemoths. What they do with all that space? 

The ultimate destination was the north end of Isla Partida, where one could swim with sea lions. We didn’t. We hadn’t rented wet suits and knew we’d freeze our butts off, given the temperature of the water and the wind in the boat. There were hundreds of sea lions, sunning, barking, leaping in the surf, and actually playing with one of our guides, who didn’t need to wear a life jacket and could dive and play with them.

En route to the north tip, we had stopped in the San Gabriel Inlet to see the largest breeding colony of Magnificent Frigatebirds in the La Paz area. They are truly magnificent, effortlessly soaring on thermals, these large black birds (females are black and white) have a split tail, angular wings with a span of about eight feet.  

Frigatebirds  in San Gabriel Inlet

Messy living

Frigatebirds are also good at stealing food, and thus have been dubbed by some as the “man-of-war bird.” They harass other birds to the point that the birds regurgitate recently captured food, which the Frigatebird snatches in midair. 

The colony was located on a rocky spit with some woody bushes, all of it coated with a white veneer of bird poop. There were hundreds—males, females, juveniles of all ages, even white balls of feathery fluff that hadn’t fledged yet.

Lucky for the birds, they are located in a highly protected area that prohibits camping, fishing and other human activities. This inlet was once the site of Gastón Vives’s pearl oyster nursery. In the early 1900’s, using his scientific expertise, he created large-scale aquaculture for pearls. The operation was complex and highly successful—an average of 8-10% of his oysters produced pearls, one of the highest percentages of any known pearling area. He employed 6% of the population of La Paz in his company (400-500) and demonstrated that he could practice species conservation by continuously replenishing the natural mother-of-pearl beds. I’m sure there were issues, but he wasn’t depleting the oysters, which had occurred again and again since the Spanish had arrived in the 1500’s.

As frequently occurs with wealthy men when a revolution is happening, Vives’s fortunes came to an end. He was tied to the regime of Porfirio Díaz, who was asked to resign in 1914. And who should be commanding the revolutionary detachment entering La Paz? His bitter enemy Colonel Cornejo, who quickly seized or destroyed all of Vives’s pearls and property. He blew up the nursery at San Gabriel, and Vives fled abroad.

I’m not sure if they’re trying to regrow the oysters in San Gabriel or if it will occur naturally, but the placid, beautiful landscape we saw that day gave no hint at what had transpired there.