Hi, everyone, and it’s great to be on the podcast. My name is Tom, and I’m part of a small charity called whale wise, we’re officially registered in the UK. But we do a lot of our work in Iceland. And we are a well conservation charity. So we use scientific research and public engagement, to try and improve the conservation and welfare of marine mammals in the wild. And so when we’re doing our research, we normally study the interactions between whale populations and human activity. And for the last couple of years, we’ve been focused in the northwest of Iceland in an area called the West Fjords. And we’re very lucky. It’s this beautiful area of these dramatic fjords and lots of whales. And we’ve been focusing on a project called scars from above, where we’ve been using drones, we’ve been flying drones, primarily from land, which is quite unusual and really good for us, flying drones from land over humpback whales to collect aerial videos and images, so that we can look at scars that relate to entanglement in fishing gear. And we can also look at their health and body condition.
But this story is from the 2023 field season. And this was back in June. And the reason that I wanted to share this story, I think a lot of whale people are going to be familiar with this. And also a lot of not whale people, is that when it comes to whales, when it comes to wildlife, generally, things are not always what they seem. And I think that can make things so exciting because you never know what you’re gonna see. And even if you think you know what you can see, actually, it can still throw up some pretty big surprises. So myself and my colleague, Alyssa, we had gone out for the afternoon, and we were looking for whales. And we were really lucky. It was a really rare Icelandic day where it was beautifully calm. It was sunny, it was the absolute perfect conditions that you wanted for droning. Now, we’re quite lucky where we are. Because we actually do a lot of our droning from our accommodations. We live in this gorgeous cabin right on the coast, right at the mouth of this really long, quite narrow fjord called Steingrímsfjörður. And so basically, we are able to step outside of our cabin and look for whales, because a lot of the time whales are there. And so this time, we stepped out. And luckily, we were able to see a couple of whales. The what was a bit, I guess, frustrating, but also really magical about this day, is the whales were actually having a bit of a chill day. And so what I mean by this is they were logging a lot. And it meant that you needed to look really, really hard to tell whether a whale was actually a whale, or whether it was something like a log, because you can just see a tiny bit of its dorsal fin sticking out at the surface. And then sometimes you can see them blowing, but it was only just about visible.
So you needed to be really vigilant even to see a whale in the first place. And then you needed to try and direct the drone operator over the whale. And so it was quite tricky. And so these will all humpback whales, humpbacks are what we usually study, and so we were confident that we were like, Okay, these are all humpbacks. This is pretty much all we see in the fjord apart from the odd minke whale, but they’re quite obvious because they’re big dorsal fin. And so humpback whales are our target species. So we went to drone over all the whales that we could. And so we saw this one shape in the distance. And I’d say it was about two kilometers away, which actually isn’t that far away for us when we’re droneing, they can be further. And we thought, Gosh, it’s not a whale, you could just see the tiniest slivers, and we could see it moving. And then we could see it blow a tiny bit. So we were like, okay, it is a whale. And the reason we could only see the blow a tiny bit is because of the lighting. Maybe if you worked a lot with whales, you’ll be familiar with this. But even though for example, with humpback whales, sometimes they blow really clearly. And you can see this very clear cloud. Sometimes the light just does funny things, and you can barely see them blowing. And you kind of don’t really believe yourself, but it’s true, you can hardly see them blowing. So anyway, we got the drone up in the air, and I was the drone operator this time. And we went to fly over the whale and we were struggling to find it because it was so invisible. That tiny little sliver wasn’t really moving at all. And then I could just see it in the distance and I didn’t want to lose it. So I was flying the drone as quickly as possible, not when we were over the whale, but just to get to the whale. And so the whale came and disappeared a tiny bit, the sliver disappeared and we’re like, dammit, we lost the whale. So we waited about 30 seconds. And then in the drones camera, so we’re using a DJI Mavic 3, I saw that sliver come up a tiny bit again and I thought okay, the whales there. I’m going to fly towards it. And then we’re just about to get over the whale and I was just ready to fly over the humpback to get the image. And I thought that was really weird. It doesn’t look black under the surface with these like shining white pecs. It looks kind of like a turquoise blue. And I was like, Huh, that’s really funny. That’s a very unusual color for a humpback whale, because they’re never colored that way. And so I got a bit closer, and it was sunny, so you can see it really clearly. And I got right over the whale. And I thought, Oh, my goodness, I’m flying over a blue whale. And so it was this huge animal and it was turquoise blue. And if you ever been lucky enough to see a blue whale, which we have on the team, we’re very lucky. You have these incredible leopard spot patterns. And we were actually flying over a blue whale. And we were so confident that it was going to be a humpback just because it’s humpbacks that you see in the fjord. It’s extremely, extremely rare to see a blue whale in the fjord. And in this part of North Iceland, generally. And so suddenly, I found myself flying over a blue whale, I got fairly nervous, but it was still useful data for us to get. And so we flew over the blue whale, it kind of stayed there for a few seconds, and then it just started traveling slowly. Fortunately, it seemed very unconcerned about the drone, which we’re very happy about. And, and that was, that was the memory to be honest. And it was just an incredible day, because there were quite a few humpbacks around, just chilling, just sleeping. And this blue whale had just apparently decided, you know what, I’m gonna go into that fjord. And I’m just going to snooze for a little bit, and I’m just going to chill. I just found that a very special moment that we could have chosen not to fly over that whale, we might have not had the drone. And if we didn’t have the drone, we would have certainly thought it was a humpback. And it just shows that these giant animals can often just come and go pretty much unnoticed. And you might assume it’s one animal, but actually, it can be something very different. And it’s in this case, it was a very endangered and very special Blue Whale. Every whale is special, but it’s it’s nice, it’s nice to have a surprise and nice to have something unusual. So anyway, so that was the story. Very fortunate. And then we spent the rest of the season the next couple of months still studying these whales flying over them in these narrow fjords, driving around looking for as many whales as we could find. And that’s it. So yeah, hope you enjoyed the story. And if you ever want to learn more about our work, you’re welcome to get in touch with Whale wise.
So basically, if you are wondering, logging is a very simple activity we see from whales when they’re snoozing, or when they’re sleeping, or when they’re just generally resting. And so logging comes from the fact that whales are lying very still at the surface with just a small part of their body showing above the water surface. And they literally look like a log. When you see them from the water from above the water. They literally look like log, they’re not moving. They’re motionless. They’ll breathe about once every minute, and then their blowhole will come above, but usually their blowholes literally just under the water. And you see their dorsal fin just above. And it’s a very peaceful thing to see. But yeah, so that’s the behavior that we call logging. It’s basically surface resting behavior.
Now that I’ve been in Iceland, most summers since 2017. And we’ve been doing a lot of drone work since 2018. And one of our big aims has actually been to drone over blue whales, now used to work in a slightly different part of the country in Skjalfandi bay in the Northeast. And there were several times we got really, really close to drowning over blue whales, because you’d see them fairly frequently in June and July relatively. But you know what, it just never quite worked out whether the season was really bad for blue whales. We didn’t see many, or whether the weather conditions just didn’t work out, or whether it got a bit dark before we could drone over them. So I’ve never actually drone over a blue whale and neither has our whale wise team actually, and then we had then it all came together. You know, we had the sun, we had stillness, we had a calm blue whale, because they move pretty quickly normally, so it can be quite hard to track them as well. So yeah, that was my first time and it was it was pretty special. I don’t think it’s a moment I’m going to forget soon.
-Tom from Whale Wise
This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 63 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here
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