Tiburón is Spanish for 'shark'. Although the Seri name, Tahejöc, was first recorded by Alphonse Pinart in 1879,[4] its etymology is unknown.
View of the southern part of Tiburón Island from Bahía de Kino
Geography
Tiburón Island is part of the Mexican state of Sonora, as well as the Hermosillo Municipality, and is located at approximately the same latitude as the city of Hermosillo. It is located along the eastern shore of the Gulf of California, opposite Isla Ángel de la Guarda. It is part of the chain of islands known as the Midriff Islands or Islas Grandes.
The island has a prominent mountain system of volcanic origin.
History
Tiburón Island is part of the traditional homeland of some bands (or clans) of the Seri people, for many centuries if not millennia.[5] Author Charles Marion Tyler described the island in his 1885 book The Island World of the Pacific Ocean, saying that "little is known [of the island], a hostile tribe of Indians being in possession."[6] Californian writer De Moss Bowers remarked in 1909 that Tiburón was "almost inaccessible" and that it had an "interior of which no white man has ever explored".[7]
In 1905, three members of a U.S. gold expedition went missing, resulting in what is known as the Tiburón Island Tragedy. Although never confirmed by the sole survivor, it was suspected the Seri people were responsible for the disappearances, as it was not the first time an incident of this nature had occurred. American writer R.E.L. Robinson and explorer George Porter also went missing on the island in the 1890s, with it being theorized at the time that they were cannibalized by the natives.[8] On 25 December 1906, one of the missing gold expeditioners corpses was found, and it was confirmed that they had died from dehydration. The remains of the other missing gold expeditioner were never found.[9][10]
During the 1960s and early 1970s, a small hunting and fishing camp on the northern end of the island was operated by Jesus Olivas, a resident of Hermosillo. He constructed several buildings, a dock and an airstrip near the historic Seri encampment at Tecomate. The camp was popular with American visitors to the area. The remains of the structures and airstrip are still in place (although the airstrip was rendered unusable by the Mexican military around 1995 in an attempt to keep it from being used by smugglers active in the area at the time). The Mexican government, through a decree by President Echeverría, gave the Seri "recognition and title of communal property" (reconocimiento y titulación de terrenos comunales) with respect to Tiburón Island in 1975.[2]
The island is currently uninhabited (except for Mexican military encampments on the eastern and southern shores of the island) and is administered as an ecological preserve by the Seri tribal government in conjunction with the federal government. Bighorn sheep were introduced to the island in the 1980s;[11] hunting is managed by the tribal government in coordination with Mexican federal authorities. It is also home to a unique subspecies of coyote (Canis latrans jamesi)[12] and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus sheldoni)[13] that are endemic to the island.
Transportation
The island can be reached from Punta Chueca, which is the nearest community inhabited by members of the Seri tribe, and from Bahía de Kino, a non-Seri community 34 kilometres (21 miles) to the south. The distance from Punta Chueca to Punta Tormenta, the nearest point on the island, is three kilometres (1+1⁄2 nautical miles). The channel between the mainland and the island is called Canal del Infiernillo ("Tiny Hell's Channel") because of the strong tidal currents and shoal water that occur there which can make navigation challenging.
Early morning view of Hast Cacöla on Tiburón Island from Socaaix (Punta Chueca)
Recreation
Two permits are required for day hiking and overnight stays on the island: one from the Seri Governor's office in Punta Chueca and another from the ISLAS office in Bahía de Kino.
In popular culture
In 2012, two television episodes of Survivorman were filmed on Tiburón Island. It featured Canadian survivalist Les Stroud spending ten days living on the island.[14]Mermaids of Tiburon is a 1962 film about a diver looking for buried treasure who comes across mermaids. Despite being set on the island, it was actually filmed on Catalina Island, off California's Pacific coast.[15]
↑ Comisión de Desarrollo de la Tribu Seri. (1976) Tribus de Sonora: Los seris. Hermosillo, Sonora.
↑ Pinart, Alphonse Louis. "Seri Vocabulary" (4 April 1879) [Manuscript]. Bureau of American Ethnology, File: Manuscript 1146, ID: NAA.MS1146, pp.27. Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
↑ Moser, Edward W. (1963). "Seri Bands". Kiva: Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History. 28 (3). Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society: 14–27. doi:10.1080/00231940.1963.11757641.
↑ Tyler, Charles Marion. The Island World of the Pacific Ocean. United States: S. Carson & Company, 1885.
Sonora, officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora, is one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, comprise the Federal Entities of Mexico. The state is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city of which being Hermosillo, located in the center of the state. Other large cities include Ciudad Obregón, Nogales, San Luis Río Colorado, and Navojoa.
Hermosillo, formerly called Pitic, is a city in the center of the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora. It is the municipal seat of the Hermosillo municipality, the state's capital and largest city, as well as the primary economic center for the state and the region. As of 2020, the city has a population of 936,263, making it the 18th largest city in Mexico. The recent increase in the city's population is due to expanded industrialization, especially within the automotive industry.
The mule deer is a deer indigenous to western North America; it is named for its ears, which are large like those of the mule. Two subspecies of mule deer are grouped into the black-tailed deer.
Mexicali Municipality is a municipality in the Mexican state of Baja California. Its municipal seat is located in the city of Mexicali. As of 2020, the municipality had a total population of 1,049,792. The municipality has an area of 13,700 km2 (5,300 sq mi). This includes many smaller outlying communities as well as the city of Mexicali. Also, the islands of Baja California located in the Gulf of California are part of the municipality, among them the mudflat islands at the mouth of the Colorado River, Isla Ángel de la Guarda and the islands of the San Lorenzo Marine Archipelago National Park. Mexicali is the northernmost municipality of Latin America.
The Seri or Comcaac people are an Indigenous group of the Mexican state of Sonora. The majority reside on the Seri communal property, in the towns of Punta Chueca and El Desemboque on the mainland coast of the Gulf of California. Tiburón Island (Tahejöc) and San Esteban Island were also part of their traditional territory. They maintain an intimate relationship with both the sea and the land. They are one of the ethnic groups of Mexico that has most strongly maintained their language and culture throughout the years after contact with Spanish and Mexican cultures.
The Sierra de la Laguna pine–oak forests are a subtropical coniferous forest ecoregion, found in the Sierra de la Laguna mountain range at the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula, Mexico.
San Esteban Island is a small island in the Gulf of California, Mexico, located to the southwest of Tiburón Island. It is part of the Municipality of Hermosillo in Sonora and has a land area of 39.773 km2, the 15th-largest island in Mexico. It is located in the Gulf of California. It was once inhabited by a group of the Seri people.
Bahía Kino is a town part of the Hermosillo Municipality in Sonora, Mexico on the Gulf of California; it was named after Eusebio Kino. It has a population of approximately 7,000 people. The name also applies to the adjacent bay between Tiburón Island and Punta San Nicolás, Sonora. The names Bahía de Kino, Bahía Kino and Kino Bay are used interchangeably.
El Desemboque is a town located 376 km from Hermosillo on the shore of Gulf of California in the Mexican state of Sonora; coordinates N 29° 30' 13", W 112° 23' 43". It is part of the Municipality of Pitiquito, and is one of two major villages on the Seri Indian communal property, the other being Punta Chueca. The Spanish name refers to the fact that the Río San Ignacio meets the sea near that point. The Seri name is literally where the clams lie. It has been a good location to find the small clams Protothaca grata (haxöl). According to the Mexican census of 2010, the town had a population of 287 inhabitants. (The town of El Desemboque described in the prior text is not located in the Pitiquito municipality of Sonora. It is a Seri village about 120 km north of Punta Chueca north of Bahia Kino where the dry Rio Ignacio meets the Gulf of California. The El Desemboque in Pitiquito is west of Caborca at the mouth of Rio Concepcion and is a small village catering to weekenders from Caborca. The Seri may have lived at the El Desemboque west of present-day Caborca in prehistoric times before Spanish arrived as well as the current Seri town north of Bahia Kino. Their oral history has them living as far north as present day Puerto Penasco which was also an O'Odham settlement as well as present-day Bahia Kino and Isla Tiburon .)
Punta Chueca is a Seri town located on the Gulf of California in the Mexican state of Sonora. It is located 25 kilometers north of the fishing and tourist town of Bahía de Kino. Both of these towns are part of the Municipality of Hermosillo. One of the two villages on the Seri Indian communal property, it has small stores, a primary school and a small satellite-fed secondary school (telesecundaria). It is one of the closest points on the mainland to Tiburón Island, separated from it by the Canal del Infiernillo. According to the Mexican census of 2010, the town, had a population of 520 inhabitants.
The San Esteban chuckwalla, also known as the piebald chuckwalla or pinto chuckwalla, is a species of chuckwalla belonging to the family Iguanidae endemic to San Esteban Island in the Gulf of California. It is the largest of the five species of chuckwallas, and the most threatened.
Hermosillo is a municipality in Sonora in north-western Mexico. The municipal seat is the city of Hermosillo.
The sea urchins of the Gulf of California live between the coasts of the Baja California Peninsula to the west and mainland state of Sonora, Mexico to the east. The northern boundary is the lateral band of land with the remains of the Colorado River Delta, and the southern is the Pacific Ocean.
Mexican ironwood carving is a Mexican tradition of carving the wood of the Olneya tesota tree, a Sonora Desert tree commonly called ironwood.
The Tiburón Island Tragedy, also known as the Grindell expedition, occurred in 1905 when three members of a small American gold prospecting expedition, led by Thomas F. Grindell, went missing in the Sonoran Desert near Tiburón Island. At the time, Tiburón was inhabited by the Seri natives, nonetheless, Jack Hoffman, the only American survivor, testified that they were not responsible for the expeditioners' deaths. The expedition, which expected to return by August 1905, consisted of Grindell, who was an educator and former clerk for the Arizona Supreme Court, Gus Olinder Ralls, D. Ingram and Hoffman, as well as their Tohono Oʼodham guide, Dolores Valenzuela. The members of the expedition are believed to have perished from starvation and thirst based on Hoffman's report that Grindell had a single donkey carry all the water through the Sonora. When the equipment they were carrying to purify the water failed, Valenzuela split from the group, while the four men decided to continue and sought a boat to carry them to Tiburón. Hoffman spent four months alone, travelling 150 miles from Tiburón to Guaymas, arriving "naked [and] blackened by the sun.
San Pedro Mártir is the name of an island of Mexico, located in the Gulf of California, about halfway between the coast of Baja California and Sonora. San Pedro Mártir is located in the center of the Gulf of California and is the most remote island in the Sea of Cortez. It is located 51 km from Baja California and 53 km off the coast of Sonora. The island is 2 km long and 1.5 km maximum width, with a total of 2,729 km2 of total area. The island is uninhabited by humans and is 60 km from Bahía Kino, the nearest city in the state of Sonora on the west coast.
The Mapimí Biosphere Reserve is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve located in the state of Durango in northern Mexico. It is one of three biosphere reserves representing the Chihuahuan Desert. The 342,388 hectares (1,321.97 sq mi) reserve is situated between the Neotropical and Nearctic biogeographic realms, in the Bolsón de Mapimí 1,150 metres (3,770 ft) above sea level. It contains three core areas in the Sierra de la Campana, the Laguna de las Palomas, a salt lagoon, and a desert habitat called Dunas de la Soledad. It comprises fragile warm desert and semi-desert ecosystems and rich, highly adapted but vulnerable plant systems, mainly xerophytic matorral scrub, and animal species such as the puma, mule deer, sandhill crane and the kit fox or zorrita del desiert along with scrub and desert grasslands.
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Bavispe Flora and Fauna Protection Area is a protected area in the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico.
The Tiburón Island mule deer or Sheldon's mule deer, is a subspecies of the mule deer that is native to Tiburón Island, Sonora, Mexico.
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