On February 21, we went a few kilometers south from busy Bahía Agua Verde to the
distinctly un-busy anchorage at Bahía San Marte, about 130 km (80 miles) north of
La Paz. Arroyos leading inland from the beach were lined as usual with lovely
palo blanco trees (
Lysiloma candidum), and Sue had fun finding new plants and
butterflies to photograph, while Curtis counted as many as 21 mockingbirds in a
single group of shrubs.
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| Heading out on a hike at Bahía San Marte. |
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| Baja California Crucifixion Thorn (Castela peninsularis), a Baja endemic. Mockingbirds love the big juicy fruits. |
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| A White-patched Skipper (Chiomara georgina). |
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The tiny Orange Skipperling butterfly (Copaeodes aurantiaca)
on Sweetbush (Bebbia juncea). |
Anchorage neighbors Janet and Frederic, on their sailboat Kyrnos, joined us for a hike after we told them how gorgeous the arroyos and vistas were. The lush canyon that Curtis had spied on Google Earth turned out to be—OOPS—a nearly impenetrable bouldery scramble overtopped by thick leafy vines. We came
back with our socks ruined and our bare legs scratched and bloody. Somehow we
had forgotten our Arizona training to wear long pants when hiking in the desert. And although we preferred the less-grazed landscape here at Bahía San Marte, both of us admitted that a personal trail-clearing goat would have been welcome!
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View northeast from a hike at Bahía San Marte; Fred, Janet, and Sue perch on boulders at far left.
Curtis took a different—and even brushier—hiking path, but it gave him good photo opportunities. |
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| Bobcat on the beach at Bahía San Marte; photo by Janet Laffitte. |
A day or two after the hike, Janet and
Frederic alerted us to a bobcat in the bay. They had watched it walk the beach, climb out onto a rock in the water, crouch down to dunk its face (for a bath? a salty drink?), and then continue along the shore toward
a group of pelicans, perhaps hoping for a pelican dinner. We got distant looks at the bobcat hiding among boulders, but by the time we kayaked
over, it had disappeared. It seemed an odd setting and behavior for a bobcat, and we wondered if it might have been sick or stressed.
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A Great Blue Heron stands guard over
Bahía San Marte. |
Bobcats (
Lynx rufus) occur across all of North America, from the northern forests on the U.S.–Canada border to the deserts of the Southwest and down to the tropical forest of southern Mexico. They are closely related to the more northern Canadian lynx, but bobcats are smaller, usually about twice the size of a domestic housecat. According to Wikipedia and other sources, there are 12 subspecies of bobcat, including one restricted to the Baja Peninsula:
Lynx rufus peninsularis. The Baja bobcat was first described back in 1898 by Oldfield Thomas, a British zoologist, who examined two specimens sent to him from "Lower California" (Baja). Thomas wrote, "This animal is no doubt a pauperized race of the California lynx [probably
Lynx rufus californicus, the California bobcat subspecies], from which it may be readily distinguished by its much smaller skull."
We see bobcats occasionally near our home in southeast Arizona, where they occur in grassland, woodland, and even on the outskirts of Tucson, but finding one on a wide-open beach in daylight was a surprise. Like many wild cats, bobcats are mainly crepuscular hunters, active at dawn and dusk. Their usual diet consists of rabbits and hares, but they will eat anything from insects to geese to deer. They are also known to take a swim now and then. We like to think the Baja bobcat at San Marte was just going for a dip on a hot afternoon.
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| Bahía San Marte. |
