Monkeys and pelicans

What's in a name?

Luz de Mono – Light of the Monkey - what a strange name for a hotel. It seems likely that there is a hidden meaning, a twist of words that eludes me because my Spanish is in its very infancy, and all I can do is put words together. But when I ask the manager, she, too, shrugs her shoulders. “The original owner was a crazy American”, she says, “the locals can't make any sense of it either. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, with the morning light, the monkeys arrive, too.”

Here goes my hope of an intriguing story ...

The light, however, and the monkeys remain. At the moment the monkeys are quiet, and the light seeping into my room is filtered by trees and vines. It is mid afternoon, and I am still not ready to face the glaring sun at the beach. I will wait a bit longer and follow the others when the shadows slowly start to lengthen.

Like Pablo Neruda, I love the ocean, but fear it, too. Frolicking in the waves holds much less attraction for me than walking on the firm, wet sand where each one breathes its last sigh, feeling the ground pull away under my feet where it retreats. I can do without the feeling of total helplessness I experienced the other day when I didn't judge an incoming wave correctly, and found myself tumbling head over heels in the seething mass, losing all sense of which way was up and which down, scraping my knees on the rough sand and the rocks under the surface.

This morning, roused by the urgent wake-up call of the howler monkeys at 5:30, I spent another peaceful hour and a half at the beach. There, every bird species has its area: the pelicans fishing off-shore, the spotted sandpipers and whimbrels tracing exactly the end of the waves on the beach, finding their food in the fine line of sea-foam, the great-tailed grackles sitting in the crowns of the trees above the driftwood line, dashing to the higher part of the beach when something catches their attention, the heron in the tide-water pools, waiting patiently until one of the tiny translucent fish gets careless and darts out of cover. If I were a bird here, I would be a sandpiper.

We have watched the pelicans on numerous occasions now, admiring their enormous fishing skills. A few of them fly in, land on the waves and bob calmly for a while. One suddenly lifts out of the water, flies a small circle, and dives, peak pointed straight down like a lance, into the crest of a wave, and again swims calmly, lifting its beak for a moment, the skin sack on its underside still twitching a bit with the swallowing movement. The next one follows suit, then another one, and again they are rocked by the waves. They never seem to miss; every time they lift their heads to swallow. They must have a very keen eye!

This morning, from our vantage point on one of the driftwood logs right above the rocky part of the shore, we watched the waves roll in and break. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to their size: for a while they are small, seem quite harmless. Then comes a set of increasingly powerful waves, lifting high above the rocks with a deep, menacing roar, breaking with a huge crash, each one bigger than its predecessor. Then it starts again, but there is no way of predicting how long it will take for the next monster waves to arrive.

The sun, just broken free of the horizon, shining at a low angle, turned the waves into translucent jade when they were lifting their powerful shoulders out of the water. Suddenly a long line of black shapes appeared to be swimming right below the spine of a high wave: a huge swarm of fish! No wonder the pelicans are so successful when their table is so richly set.

We kept a close eye on the incoming waves, but here, too, no prediction was possible: some waves had fish in them, others didn't. What are the fish doing so close to shore, and how can they still make it back out to sea instead of being thrown on the beach? How do the pelicans know which waves carry fish and which don't? They lift up at just the right moment, rarely circle more than twice, and – bingo! - swallow their food.

To me, it is as much a mystery as what makes the monkeys howl exactly twenty minutes before sunrise.



Sunset at Montezuma Beach