Nature & Wildlife
“Being inside a kaleidoscope!” That is how I describe the feeling of standing amongst millions and millions of butterflies in the sanctuaries outside of Mexico City during the great migration. You can even hear the sound of their wings beating.
Latin America
Butterflies seem to be one of the most fragile of all creatures. Yet the stately monarch butterfly embarks on an annual migration of 2,000-3,000 miles from locations in the United States and southern Canada all the way to the highlands of central Mexico.
News & More
Nature surrounds us with an amazing variety of animals, insects, birds, plants and topographic features. To refer to and distinguish the entities in this bounty, we assign them names—often two: one for common use and one, a two-parter, for scientific identification. Usually, the person credited with discovering or finding something new gets naming rights.
Videos
In September 2008 while their boat was in the Sea of Cortez between Isla Ángel de la Guarda and Bahia de los Angeles, Mexico, some fishermen encountered a pod of dolphins.
Videos
Campephilus imperialis (the imperial woodpecker) may have been the largest woodpecker that ever lived. The last documented sighting of this two-foot-tall bird happened in 1956 in the state of Durango, in the high-altitude, old-growth pine forest of the Sierra Madre in Mexico.
Videos
We humans have long feared the dark. That’s where scary monsters hide and criminals lurk. So that’s why, for most of our history on the planet, we’ve been trying to dominate the night by filling it with light. In many cases, illuminating our nights has worked.
Nature & Wildlife
If you dread overseas flights because you always land intolerably tired and exceedingly hungry, I have some facts that might help you put such ordeals into perspective. It was recently discovered that a female bar-tailed godwit flew 7,145 miles from Alaska to New Zealand—without taking a single break for food or drink.
Nature & Wildlife
Greetings from Loreto, Mexico! I’m excited to be joining a Natural Habitat group that’s headed today to San Ignacio Lagoon, on the west coast of Baja California Sur, where we’ll be spending the next few days among the mama and baby gray whales who migrate here each winter.
News & More
When the Carnival cruise ship Splendor was towed into the San Diego Harbor late last week after being stranded off the coast of Mexico by an engine fire, many news reporters and bloggers commented that the 3,299 passengers and 1,167 crew had endured an “adventure at sea.”
News & More
Smiling sightseers in Uganda, Africa. Big grins on the faces of tourists to Costa Rica. An enthusiastically clapping audience for the whales off the Mexican Baja Peninsula. Come to think of it, have you ever seen a solemn or even remotely grumpy person in a travel photo?
Travel Tales
The Mud Hen was a great little steamboat—a one-of-a-kind, respectable, lake-worthy craft. When I was about eight years old, my uncle Verne, a carpenter and a lover of steam engines, built her out of wood and marine plywood with his own hands.
Conservation
Imagine the sight of thousands of 100-pound sea turtles, packed side by side on an expanse of beach stretching for two miles along Mexico’s Pacific coast. It’s not an image that comes easily to mind, considering how endangered these creatures are worldwide (see Good Nature on 9/25/2009 for more on the challenges sea turtles face).
