tbaroundtheworld

For years, we’ve been counting birds down here and trying to draw conclusions from what we observe. Back in the late 1990’s, I read about a Grebe die-off in California and sure enough, months later we had hundreds of little emaciated bodies washing up on the shore. And since that time, we’ve never gone back to the amounts seen before the event. In other years, we’ve observed crashes of the Brown Pelican and Double-crested Cormorant populations that I wrote gloomily about as evidence of the destruction of the Gulf fishery and the doom of both species. But as time went on, the birds came back and today they appear to be about the same as ever. This year though we seemed to be down on both those two and the local Blue-footed and Brown Booby populations. In the case of the former two, decent numbers seen from shore but far less than the thousands I normally count. The observed numbers of the latter two though has been downright depressing. Instead of hundreds, I’d only managed 4 birds i...

One of the last things we did before we left for this trip was to purchase and deliver a couple of gifts for two boys on our village “wishing tree.” A nice pair of Sony over-the-ear headphones for Aiden and a cool Lego village building kit for Deaghan. We went back to see if there were any wishes left, but happily our fellow Corraleños had come through – the tree was bare. A couple of days into our birding, we took a drive out to the far end of town to briefly have a look at a landlocked pond that used to be part of the now defunct Club Med. There is rarely anything there, and that streak was continued with a single Loon and a handful of Gulls. While there we stopped into one of the local expat hangouts – The Soggy Peso – to have a look at their “wishing tree.” It was covered with tiny photographs of the children of La Manga, a pop-up fishing village that has grown from nothing to 5 pangas , drying nets and a handful of fisherman crashed out for the day on the dunes, to a full-fle...

How exactly does memory work when it comes to planning? Do you have a mental checklist that’s refined over time? Or do items jog your memory, demanding to be included? When it comes to travel, I’ve always found it to be both ways – there are things I know I need to do and things I see when I am doing the former that are included in the preparations. This time around, my system failed me. We’ve been coming down here in December for more than 20 years. In that time our preparations have ebbed and flowed and been refined to the point that it’s pretty much a rote process with the only variation of how I put things in the car. What we need always makes it, and what we need to do beforehand always gets done. So, imagine my surprise when back from the immigration hut, 21 km into this foreign country, I recall that we don’t have Mexican car insurance. For years, I bought an annual policy, renewed by mail, purchased, shoved in the glove box and forgot about it. That approach was the most e...