Wednesday, August 9
Breakfast at 6:30, Boat trip to south end of bay, to La Mona, to bird watch. We had only two boats, so two thirds of the group went by boat to the estuary and the third group went by van as far down the road as they could, and then a boat went to pick them up. Jeff and I were on one of the first two boats. While we waited for the third group, we walked down the beach looking at, and for, shells. Right off the boat I found three conch shells and got all excited, then it turned out that they were ALL over the beach between the mid and high tide lines, AND no one was living in them. Everywhere else, it seemed like every time someone would find a really cool looking shell, it had a hermit crab living in it. Darn those crabs! Their taste was too good. Why couldn’t they like those yucky broken shells to live in instead? Anyway, everyone was finding shells and every time we’d find one, we’d toss the old one because the new one was better. Soon it was a matter of, “Well, this one is too dark” or “This one is too light” or “This one is too small”. Talk about getting picky. One guy had walked down the beach the other direction and he came back with keyhole sand dollars. Those were amazing, too.
After
lunch I washed some clothes in a dish pan and hung them out to dry and while
I was washing, I finally decided on a topic for my presentation. I’d gone
around and around in my head on what to do and had thoughts of doing it on the
key hole sand dollar because we’d found so many, but I just wasn’t
that interested in it. Coming to a final decision was tough for me because I’d
done some research on things to talk about. My first inclination was to talk
on the edible plants of Baja, but after going through a book about the plants
of Baja, I gave up because it was so confusing and I was having a hard time
wading through the book finding edible plants (Greg, one of our teachers, said
that the reason there is no book published on the edible plants of Baja is because
no one wants to buy a book with only four pages). So, looking at plants lead
me to names of plants that I didn’t know, one was the Boojum tree. In
reading about the boojum, I learned that it had a lichen that grew on it called
Ramalina Menziesii or Orchilla (Spanish moss). Well THAT was interesting to
me because I read that in the late 19th century the moss was used to make a
purple dye. I thought I could actually try making the dye and show it in use,
etc. But then as we came over the hills from the desert down into Bahia, I saw
boojum trees, but no moss. Uh-oh. Then I read in a book at the station that
stated that the moss is prevalent on the western side of Baja because of the
Pacific Ocean fog. Well, idea #2 down the drain. I was a little ticked off that
all the things I was interested in were falling through. Finally I decided to
go ahead and do the boojum tree because I knew some stuff about it since it
was attached to the moss I wanted to do. Okay, time to go do some research.