Video of the Week: Biosphere Reserve at Isla San Pedro Martir
This week we are revisiting the most remote island in the Sea of Cortes, San Pedro Martir. San Pedro is a Ramsar & Unesco World Heritage Site. In April of 2008 I was contracted to produce a conservation video on San Pedro Martir island by Islas del Gulfo de California. Islas del Gulfo is responsible for overseeing the management of the island. What we were documenting was the eradication of an introduced species to the island. Namely Black Rats. In the late 19th Century thousands of tonnes of bird shit, or for the politically correct, Guano were mined from the Gulf of California and shipped all over the world, mostly to Europe and the U.S. With the guano miners & steam ships also came the black rat which infested the island up until 2008 when a conservation group from the Baja, Conservation de islas http://conservaciondeislas.org/ successfully eradicated our four legged friend. A month later I spend another couple of days with yet another NGO named Cobi, http://www.cobi.org.mx/ which stands for Comunidad Y Biodiversidad, to document how 9 commercial divers from Bahia Kino have been trained to be wild life biologists and take scientific data and monitor marine species around the island. We will be going back to Martir frequently to see how things are going with the Biosphere reserve.
Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the images of Martir, it took 4 sweaty days to take these images and you can just imagine what the island smells like and if anyone is interested in going to Martir and hiking on the island I can help arrange a charter and expedite your permits.