As we drew closer to the island, it became clear that the black haze hovering over Isla Isabel wasn’t smoke or clouds, but an insanely dense flock of frigate birds. A few minutes later, Linus spotted a spout in the distance, and Alex began to lose his cool as two 20 foot whales surfaced just 100 feet off our bow. Alex is constantly afraid an Ahabian encounter will send Saltbreaker down to the depths. We pulled unscathed into the collapsed and flooded caldera of a dormant volcano on the southern coast and dropped the hook, having sailed 90 miles anchor-to-anchor from Mazatlan. This is when the pirate attacks began.
Due to their awkward feet, frigate birds have the ridiculous inability to take off from a horizontal surface. For a seabird that travels thousands of miles, this means they can’t even land in the water to rest, being forced to stay aloft for weeks at a time till they find something to perch on. If that’s not crazy enough, it turns out that frigate birds feed almost exclusively on fish; they cruise inches above the forbidden sea surface dipping their beaks in the water every so often to scoop up surface bait. When they can’t pull enough fish out of the ocean themselves, they resort to theft. In a desperate struggle for food, frigates will attack any bird with a recent meal in it’s stomach, nipping at their feet and forcing them to regurgitate their catch out of fright (we would learn later that scaring birds till they puke is actually pretty easy to do). The frigate birds get a free lunch, and for their poor morals, are also known as “pirate birds”. We watched as a thousand sky pirates stole whatever they could in an epic battle above the boat.
Pirates
The entire island of Isla Isabel is a bird sanctuary, and the largest breeding ground for frigate birds in Mexico. Dinghying to shore, we found easily 10 times as many birds resting in trees on the island as there were in the sky, bringing a conservative estimate of the frigate population up to 10,000. The frigates took up every available branch, as long as it was more than a couple feet off the ground so they could take off again. Trying to attract a mate, the males sat with inflated red gullets, drumming them with their beaks in a bizarre show of manliness. In the middle of a clearing, we found one frigate sitting still on the flat ground. Having lost a potentially fatal game of “hot lava”, he seemed to have accepted the fact that he may never fly again.
Little Drummer Bird
Hiking up a peak on the island, we walked right into the blue footed booby nesting ground. These guys were littered everywhere. Funnily enough they nest in pairs. It turns out boobies prefer to make their nests at the narrowest part of the trail directly between the cliff edge and fields of impassable brush. Whispering apologies, we inched around the nests, making several boobies vomit in the process, only to find hundreds of pairs boobies blocking the way ahead.
A Nice Pair
These guys know their feet are something special. When looking for a mate, they’ll lift up one brilliantly blue foot and flap it around a bit to show off before switching to the next foot, hopping around like that till they’re either accepted or rejected based on the blueness of their feet. The population on Isla Isabel seemed to be split 50-50 in their love or fear of humans. Like so many other things in life, I either made them want to dance or vomit.
Dancin' Feet
We stayed two nights at Isabel, leaving in part to get Linus to the mainland to catch a flight back home, and in part to prevent Saltbreaker and her crew from taking on the off-white hue of bird shit which covered nearly every leaf and horizontal surface of the island.
Long hot showers were welcomed upon arrival in San Blas.