Wed Aug 19 – Whale Watching
Humpbacks and more Common Bottlenose dolphins
A special day for many reasons
As usual, we were headed to where we had seen whales on our previous trip. We were lucky enough to encounter a very special whale, Nile’s 2016 calf.
Three weeks ago this 4 year-old calf was found severely entangled in 3900 pounds of cable and line about 10 miles out of New York Harbor. He had just enough slack to allow him to surface in breath. It took the disentanglement teams three days to get him out. Our sighting of this juvenile whale with the first since he was disentangled. The disentanglement was a joint effort of many institutions, they’ve been notified of our sighting and are elated! He is scarred severely but is feeding and seems to be moving quite well we have our fingers crossed. By the way, we also saw him in 2018.
Other humpback whales and minke whales were seen, but only three humpbacks were photographed on this trip including NYC0085 (also seen last year) and a new whale we call MTK.2020.08.19-04.
As in last trip, we also encountered inshore bottlenose dolphins, but this time in small groups. Maybe a total of 120 that were working to catch prey and we saw mating too. It was a special day and we hope for the best for Nile’s 2016 calf.
- 5 humpbacks
- 1 minke
- 100-120 NW Atlantic Norther Migratory Common Bottlenose dolphins
- 2 Manx Shearwaters
- ~10 Great Shearwaters
- ~13 Cory’s Shearwaters
PHOTOS from the 8/19/2020 trip
