Cave explorers in western Mexico are well acquainted with the vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus. Grupo Zotz, the western branch of SMES, the Mexican Society for Underground Exploration, has explored hundreds of caves in the area and reports that approximately 90 percent of them house at least one colony of vampires.

For years I had heard that the place to go for whale watching was Magdalena Bay off Baja California, but ever since my friend Bruce’s truck “drowned” aboard a ferryboat heading for Baja (fortunately, Bruce, survived), I had lost interest in making that particular crossing.

Not long ago, Canadian canyoneer Chris Lloyd showed us slides of a recent, exciting river adventure. Once again, he and his friends had succeeded in being the first to “do” a river canyon from start to finish. Canyoneering, of course, is that sport in which you leap off the top of numerous waterfalls, rappel down ropes through the frothy spray, plunge into icy pools at the bottom and hopefully swim to safety. Not exactly a sport for the faint-hearted.

Ivan Dibble, the Englishman who saved many of Mexico’s rare fish from extinction, passed away on Christmas Day, seated at his computer, working on a new project to protect another endangered species in the Mexican state of Jalisco.