The last time I sailed into Cabo San Lucas, a humpback whale breached several hundred yards off the port side of my cruise ship, the Majestic Princess. I was sitting on my stateroom's balcony as the local pilot chaperoned us into the scenic bay and the whale leapt out of the sea and splashed back down spectacularly. It was February, prime season to view the long-distance traveling behemoths in the area.
On my November return to Baja California Sur, this time on the Discovery Princess, I didn't see any whales. However, shortly before the sail into Bahia Cabo San Lucas, I observed an equally fascinating yet much smaller creature from my starboard balcony: a lone northern fulmar.
It wasn't my first time identifying the seabird; I had succeeded at that on an October cruise off the coast of Washington State. In fact, on that occasion, I observed three or four of them, swooping and gliding with stiff wings off the rear of the ship, occasionally diving under water. They were colored like seagulls, with mostly white bodies and gray wings.
The individual off of Cabo San Lucas was all gray, a dark morph, as identification guides describe it. I photographed it over the course of five minutes, watching it glide close to the water, closing the gap with our ship by less than twenty feet at times, but never seeing it dive.
I could make out the fulmar's nostril tubes which help the bird excrete the salt from the vast amount of seawater consumed. These birds share similar ducts with albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters, cousins that are also pelagic, all feeding and living on the open sea outside the breeding season.
In the Pacific, the northern fulmar's range extends from the Arctic to as far south as the waters off of California and Baja. Cabo San Lucas appears a ways south of the maps that I studied on the subject. I wonder how far outside its normal wintering area the bird has to be before we can call it a vagrant. Whatever the case, avid birders might have a chance to check a unique bird off their life list on their next fishing trip or whale watching excursion out of Cabo.
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| Northern fulmar off of Cabo San Lucas. |
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| Northern fulmar off of Cabo San Lucas. |
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| Northern fulmar off of Cabo San Lucas. |
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| Northern fulmar off of Cabo San Lucas. |
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