Mon July 22 – Whale Watching
Whale watch on the Viking Star, one of the best local whale trips of the past 20+ years!
Once again, we are running out of superlatives! Today’s trip, like so many others, began with a small pod of 15 Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins. We received a report of “20 whales” miles ahead, about where they were on Sunday’s trip. The 20 whales, turned out to be over 45 different whales!!! At least 36 humpbacks, including 2 mom and calf pairs (Reaper and calf, and Ampersand and calf); and at least 4 fin whales including a female we had first seen in 7/21/2013, and saw again last year. This summer she’s had her 2024 calf and we’ve seen and her her for 3 weeks now. At least 4 minke whales, and short-beaked common dolphins, all within a 6 square nautical mile area.
The whales were feeding at the surface, and also in some areas throughout the water column. The humpbacks employed several different feeding patterns. Two, including Habanero, were chin slapping, then kicking, then diving in concentrated prey and coming up filtering and “dragging;” long surface filtering sessions. We had cooperative bubble- ring feeding amongst many groups of humpbacks (they are the only baleen whales to do this), some groups of 5, others or 9, and still others of 11 or more, almost all simultaneously feeding around us. This cooperative feeding began at 12:30 PM and was still going on when we had to leave 1.5 hrs. later. Needless to say, there were pelagic birds everywhere the whales were feeding: Great shearwaters, Cory’s shearwaters, Sooty shearwaters, Wilson’s storm-petrels were all over the feeding whales.
30-36 humpback whales
4-6 finback whales
4-6 minke whales
15 Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins
90 Short-beaked common dolphins
150 Wilson’s storm-petrels
60 Sooty shearwaters
300 Great shearwaters
210 Cory’s shearwaters
Photos Here:
Photos Here: