Tue July 10
Sunday July 8
3 Species of Whale, 1 Species of Dolphin, and 11 species of Pelagic and Coastal Birds!
What an amazing day on the water. We had reports of whales from Saturday, but we had friends out there and said they weren’t seeing anything. With no information except our 30 year knowledge of whale feeding areas near Montauk, Captain Dave and Naturalist Dr. Artie Kopelman formulated a plan and headed to an area that has almost always has been productive. Within an hour of passing Montauk Light, we had our first minke whale. Like other minkes, this one was elusive. As we were waiting for the minke to resurface, we saw the blows from a larger whale about 1.5 nautical miles (nm) away. Off we headed to find our second species – humpback whale. The humpback breached about 1 nm ahead of us, we were able to stay with this whale for 40 minutes as it circled, traveled, and dove over a 3.5 nm path . We got great views of the ID patterns on the ventral side of the flukes. From this point we saw the massive blows of a fin whale ½ nm away (our 3rd baleen whale species)! The fin whale was only about 50’ long and had easily seen entanglement scars on its right flank and harder to see shallow propeller scars on its back just in front of its dorsal fin. About ½ mile from the fin whales we saw an aggregation of about 60 short-beaked common dolphins and spent the next 20 minutes being amazed by the dolphins as they rode our bow and swam and porpoised all around. What a day!
Totals:
1 minke whale
1 humpback whale
1 finback whale
60 short-beaked common dolphins
98 Cory’s Shearwater
53 Great Shearwater
14 Sooty Shearwater
4 Manx Shearwater
148 Wilson’s Storm-Petrel
1 Northern Gannet
8 Double-crested Cormorant
7 Laughing Gull
130 Herring Gull
121 Great Black-backed Gull
49 Common Tern
Bird counts by Taylor Sturm (passenger)