Travel
A Whale of a Tale
For a truly touching vacation, travel to Mexico’s Magdalena Bay, where you can look into the eye of a forty-ton gray and feel her leathery skin.
(Page 2 of 2)
In preparation for this annual journey, the grays load up on seafood in the waters of the Arctic. Feeding around the clock for months, they scoop up mouthfuls of tiny crustaceans from the Arctic seabed and filter out the mud and sand using their baleen plates. Harvested at one time for use as corset stays, baleen (or whalebone) is made of a fibrous protein called keratin that grows in long bristles in the jaws of gray whales. In November, when Arctic waters begin to freeze, the whales head south, fasting for most of the five months until they return to the Arctic. During this period, a forty-ton whale may lose ten tons of its body weight as it lives off fat stores of blubber not needed in the warmer waters farther south. The calves are born on the journey south, usually off the coast of Southern California, coming into the world fifteen feet long and weighing two thousand pounds.
“No one has ever seen the birth of a gray whale,” says our Baja Expeditions tour guide, Alan Cortash, as we eat lunch in the ship’s dining room. Cortash also describes for us how a baby whale nurses: The mother whale extends her nipple and flexes certain muscles to inject her heavy, creamy milk into the baby’s mouth. “The babies continue to nurse all winter in the lagoons,” Cortash says, “swimming constantly with their mothers, almost always against the tide, presumably to build their strength for the journey north.”
As our time aboard the Don Jose passes in the company of whales, my appreciation for our early contact with the friendly mother-baby pair grows by the hour. We do not find any more whales displaying such curiosity—and, indeed, in an unusually wet and chilly winter in Magdalena Bay, ours is one of the only groups to experience such intimate contact. But there is never a shortage of whales: One afternoon near the tidal entrance to the bay, we can see fifty of sixty of them in the area around us, many of them “spyhopping”—emerging from the water head first, spinning gracefully until their eyes appear above the surface, then quickly sinking out of sight. Just beyond the breakers, the horizon is filled with hundreds of heart-shaped twelve-foot-high spouts. We gasp and cheer in unison each time we see a whale breach, bringing perhaps 75 percent of its body out of the water and crashing back into the ocean with a gigantic splash.
Some of the best whale watching is of whales mating, which generally involves multiple males with any one female. Experts believe that gray whales thrive on body contact, although unlike certain species of butterflies, and unlike mating rhinoceroses, the coupling grays do not remain hooked up for hours at a time. The group sexual activity may go on for hours, yet any given sexual act may be over within minutes. Still, it is clear why the Mexican government strictly regulates all whale watching in Magdalena Bay—not just for the protection of the whales but for the safety of the watchers. Our boatmen, Felix and Luis, who have years of experience guiding tours here, are always careful to keep the pangas away from the mating whales, a wise precaution considering that a decade ago a boat collided with an adult gray and two whale watchers died.
When no whales are approaching the boat, we content ourselves with motoring slowly in the path of one or more whales, hoping for a good photo opportunity—perhaps a ten-foot-wide tail sticking straight up in the air just before a dive. Like land animals, whales leave an indication of the path they have taken. When the whale submerges, the upstroke of its tail makes a large flat circle on the surface, and because the water keeps flowing up to the surface from below, the circle remains for quite some time after the whale has moved on. These “tailprints” are not marred even by the wake of a motorized skiff, so a series of them can be easily followed.
The more whales we see, the more I begin to realize that each has its own distinctive appearance. Every gray whale has a low hump, six to twelve knobs farther down the spine, and an upper jaw that overhangs the lower, giving its mouth the appearance of a gigantic parrot’s beak. While the babies are uniformly gray at birth, the adults have a lighter, mottled color that is a result of barnacles, whale lice, and scarred patches, the patterns and shades of which are unique to each whale. It is also possible to identify the older whales by the bite marks on their fins and tails made by hungry orcas, or killer whales. Toothed whales (such as Shamu) eat everything from fish and seals to both baby and adult grays. Hunting in packs much like wolves or hyenas, the orcas gang up on a much larger gray and drown it by latching onto its tail, then pushing it below the surface, or the orcas might rip out the gray’s tongue, causing it to bleed to death.
Unlike orcas, gray whales are no longer in danger of being captured by man. The only large whale ever maintained in captivity as a baby gray netted in 1971 by an expedition from San Diego’s Sea World. Eighteen feet long and weighing four thousand pounds, Gigi was placed in a large tank for scientific study and public viewing. Eight months later she was eating a ton of squid per day and growing too fast for any tank to hold her. A year after her capture se was released into the Pacific during the migrating season and has subsequently been seen in the wild.
Late on our final afternoon, as the pangas return my companions to the Don Jose for a farewell margarita celebration, I ask our boatman to drop me off for a walk on nearby Magdalena Island, a seventy-mile-long finger of sand that separates the bay from the ocean. As I climb from the mangrove brakes into the dunes, the ship and all civilization disappear behind me. As far as I can see, the shifting sand ripples in endless patterns of wind and wave—millions of parallel lines stretching up and down the dunes like tracings of the hands of a thousand-fingered god. After a two-mile hike, much of the way following the tracks of two coyotes who in turn were following the tracks of a fleeing rabbit, I finally top the last row of the dunes for a view of the roaring ocean.
My jacket zipped tight against the cold, I sit on the beach surrounded by the treasures I have found nearby: a tiny sea horse, the giant shell of a green sea turtle, and a massive bleached-white whale bone. Staring out at several whale spouts beyond the surf, I begin to ponder the vastness of the natural world, whose mysteries continue to defy our full understanding. In places such as this, in the songs of the shore birds that chase away the chill of the ocean from which we came, and in the knowing eyes of the earth’s oldest and greatest creatures, the majesty of life, on rare occasions, reaches out and touches us.
Travel Information
Reservations on Aeroméxico can be booked by calling 800-237-6639.
To contact Baja Expeditions call 800-843-6967.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
