Riders on the Wind! Isla Mujeres Mexico.

A cloud of frigatebirds over North Beach.

On a puff of wind, the large, iridescent black shapes float past, slowly gaining altitude as the warm air updrafts, or thermals, lift them higher and still higher into the atmosphere. A slight adjustment to the tilt of a wing, the position of the tail and the bird effortlessly climbs higher still. 

Dozens of frigatebirds glide past our house, joining the hundreds that are arriving from all directions. They enter the thermal spiral, sliding in place without interrupting the flight pattern of others, all playing, soaring in the updraft. I lean backwards, craning my neck into an uncomfortable position, trying to count the birds. It's an impossible task with hundreds more joining in. The spiral looks to contain a thousand or more black birds, soaring, gliding, spinning upward until they are mere specks in the sky. 

3 feet tall, and a wingspan of up to 7 feet

These enormous birds stand about 3 feet tall (about a metre) and have wingspans of up to 6 1/2 feet wide (about 2.3 metres). The females are black with white underbellies, and the males are black with a bright red throat pouch that, during mating season, is inflated to attract a female. Once the birds have paired off and mated, the throat pouch on the male changes to a deep pink. Groups of males will put on a spectacular courtship display with their throat sacs inflated, clattering their bills, bobbing their heads and quivering their wings. 

Apparently, it works. The females think they are quite handsome. The pair will remain monogamous for the season. Both parents share in feeding the one or two chicks for the first three months. Then the chicks will stay another eight months with the mother, noisily demanding to be fed even though they are nearly as big as the parent.

Coordinated flight paths over discarded stingray carcass.

Unlike most ocean-going birds, the frigatebirds can't swim, can't walk well on land, and have difficulty taking off from a flat surface, but they can stay aloft for more than a week at a time, flying as much as 225 kilometres before they land, catching 30-second naps while drifting in the updrafts. When hunting over the ocean surface, they snatch small fish or baby turtles using their long, hooked bills. 

When food is plentiful, the birds aren't aggressive with each other. We have seen them coordinate their flight paths - flying in an orderly pattern from right to left over a ray carcass, picking off bits of meat. Not squabbling, but cooperating.  All of them feasting. 

Flying in a pattern, right to left. Everyone eats!

Other times, they perform like fighter pilots, using speed and maneuverability, attacking another frigatebird until the food is dropped mid-air.  I have had the experience of a bright blue still-flopping fish landing beside me, the lost prize from a battle between two frigatebirds. I put it back in the ocean, but the drop from several hundred feet guaranteed that it was not going to live. It flipped over on its side, stunned, not moving. 

Unfortunately, the two squabbling birds had lost interest in the hapless fish and had moved on to another battle.

Peace returns when the updrafts are perfect, and another 'fly-in' begins. 

The birds once again start drifting past, slowly gaining elevation. Heading up, up and away.  Like Peter Pan and Wendy.

I recently found this interesting bit of information on another blog site:

"Occasionally, the birds even entered REM sleep. You may think this is a crazy thing to do while flying, but unlike us, where bursts of REM sleep are lengthy and involve complete loss of muscle tone, REM sleep in birds lasts for only a few seconds. That said, the resulting loss of muscle tone caused the heads of the birds to dip during flight, but amazingly, it doesn’t affect their flight patterns." 

When you are on the island, look up and enjoy the show of the giant frigate birds.

Hasta luego
Lynda & Lawrie

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Isla Mujeres Mystery Series

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Death in the Vineyards Mysteries

The Adventures of Thomas and Sparky

Salt of the Earth, Isla Mujeres, Mexico!

Some time ago, our friend Freddy Medina mentioned that his island ancestors gathered salt from the island's landlocked briny lakes. The salt was used for preserving fish right up to the time that electricity and refrigerators became available. I thought that was an interesting story, so I decided to research the salt works on Isla Mujeres.

Salina Grande on Isla Mujeres

For several weeks, I had been cruising the internet trying to find more information about the salt works without much success until I found the Aztlan Association and website. This association is a group of forty-five or more experts on all things Meso-American. Their backgrounds range from a professor at the University of Arizona, the curator of the Ancient America Museum Exhibitions, a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas, to a Gallery Specialist of Pre-Columbian artifacts at Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida. (You get the idea!) The number of PhD degrees, attached to the various names, is amazing.  I am one of a handful of “amateur” members of the Aztlan Association. Thankfully, a number of the professionals were more than happy to answer my questions.

Some of the inhabitants of the Salina Grande

The gist of the story is that when the Spanish discovered Isla in 1519, the islanders were already using salt as a preservative as well as trading it to the mainland villages from what is now Puerto Morelos in the south up to as far as Veracruz in the north for other supplies. According to Fernando Alcocer, the salt was traded for products like skins, meat, jade, obsidian, cotton blankets, and honey. The salt works were exploited by the villagers of Dolores, the original name of the town at the north end of Isla Mujeres, which is now referred to as el Centro on the island. 

As Rae Clare, another member of the Aztlan Association, sent me a quote from a book written in the 1880s by Alice lePlongeon: "At the beginning of the fishing season, men and women would collect the salt that was deposited by evaporation on the shore of the pools. They seemed to regard it as a kind of picnic, though the work was laborious, especially for the women, who stood up to their waists in muddy water all day long, putting the salt into large turtle shells that served as vats.  It would have been almost impossible to transport the salt by land to the village of Dolores; the only roads are narrow pathways through the thicket, and the soil is so rocky and uneven that it would have been very tiresome to walk, much more so to carry a load."

Looking to the west side of the Salina Grande

The Spanish Salt Survey of 1605 stated that Isla Mujeres produced around 650 tons of salt annually; however, in 1977, one of the Aztlan members interviewed a long-time islander, Don Ausencio Magaña, who thought the total would be closer to 100 tons annually. Around 1974, the three salt pans were abandoned, and they became an unofficial location to dispose of household garbage. 

At some point between 1979 and the present time, the Salina del Cañotal, which is now referred to as the Salina Grande, became a city park. It has been refurbished with a wide and relatively smooth walking or biking pathway that circumnavigates the Salina, along with lighting and benches. The concrete walls surrounding the Salina Grande are repainted every three years in the campaign colours of the current presidente/mayor. We have been through the purple and orange administration, then the pink and blue administration, then the navy blue and orange period, and recently pale pink and green.

A side benefit to the Salina being cleaned up is that there is a variety of birds that have taken up residence in the former salt pans. 

We have seen spoonbills, herons, egrets, frigate birds, and gulls of course.  

Good photo-ops for nascent National Geographic photographers! 

Friendly neighbours

It always amazes me what information can be found on the internet. But I wouldn't have thought to research the salt works without the original comment from Freddy Medina, who started me on this quest. 

Hasta Luego
Lynda and Lawrie

Grab your copy today!

Isla Mujeres Mystery Series

Or

Death in the Vineyards Mysteries

The Adventures of Thomas and Sparky