North Atlantic Right Whale
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A Close Up Right Whale Encounter – 4/25
My name is Dr. Elena Berg and I’m an environmental science professor at the American University of Paris. And I wanted to relay a little story of a whale I saw off the coast of Cape cod, Massachusetts. I have seen whales in the wild many times. I’ve been very, very fortunate to travel a lot in the world. I was a field biologist for about 20 years and it’s been absolutely a joy to be able to experience so many different habitats, ecosystems, places. I don’t study whales. I study primates and birds. But again, I’ve had lucky opportunities to,beyond the ocean a lot as well, and sea whales. So this was a special time in my life too. I was visiting my oldest, dearest friend in the world, whom I’ve known since I was 5 years old. And I’m 52 now. So we’ve been, really close for many decades, and I had been missing her. And I made a special visit, which I rarely have time to do these days with a busy life and family. But I made a special visit just to see her, on my way to another meeting that I had. And we spent a few days together, including this kind of magical weekend in Cape Cod. That day we met up with some of her close friends who really feel like family to me after all these years. And we took a little hike, down to this gorgeous beach, Race Point, which is a really special place because it has a really deep drop off right offshore. And what that means is when whales migrate through that area, which, you know, several species do, you can see them really up close, even just sitting on the beach because the drop off is so sudden there. And we had hiked down and I didn’t have high expectations that we were going to magically see whales. We were there the right time of year, but you never know. But right when we arrived, we saw, you know, there had been people on that beach all day waiting for what we saw. Boom. Right in front of us in that moment that we arrived. And it was this beautiful Right Whale. You could see its tail flipping up into the distance. But it was just such a magical moment, of being able to see this enormous creature just doing its thing. Some of the emotions that I feel when I see whales, I think it’s always bittersweet because on the one hand it’s just so awe inspiring to see these giant creatures in their native habitat, minding their business, being part of this world. They’re so important to the kind of community ecology of the oceans. And, you know, the bitter part of it or the bittersweetness is the concern I always carry about human impacts on the environment and on what we’re doing to all of our global natural spaces. We don’t really know much about the oceans. The world is covered in oceans, but we know kind of the least about these ocean habitats relative to other spaces on the planet. So I always feel concerned that we’ll drive species to extinction before we really even know they exist. And that will kind of irreparably damage our planet. So, yes, lofty, sad, big. But it’s always that mix of emotions, the, kind of joy, just pure joy in seeing these animals moving through the world, but also a concern I feel about how much longer we’re gonna have, especially these sort of bigger species on this planet. -Elena Listen to this encounter from Dr. Elena on our Patreon at the $1/month level. This story came to us via the new podcast, Oceanography, check it out!
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Rare Encounter with North Atlantic Right Whales – 26/5/24
So in May, right before Memorial Day, I was out on a sailing trip with Apparent Winds Research, an education charter sailboat. We were out on the Hudson Canyon for a few days and we were looking for sperm whales for a filming project. We did not find any sperm whales, but so we had a spout in the distance and it was our first spout. And, in the past, when I’ve been on the canyon, we’ve been able to find sperm whales. And that’s kind of the species I was expecting to see off the shelf break where we were. And so I thought that’s what the spout was. And so we get a better look. There’s no dorsal fin. I was like, okay, well, that’s a sperm whale. And then. And then it wasn’t. I pull up my binoculars and we have a right whale, like, speeding, like he is hauling across the horizon, offshore of us. And so I’m like, okay, well, we’re not, that’s crazy. He was too far to get a photo, but, like, that was cool. No one’s gonna believe us. And so we keep going. We, we move inshore, right up to the mouth of the canyon. I say inshore. We’re still like a hundred miles southeast of New York City. • And then this fog starts to set in. But just like, you know, half a mile away at the edge of this fog, we see two whales come up and blow. And it’s two right whales. And then, engines off and then like all around us in this fog, like, you know, just as far as we can see, it’s just right whales come up. And so we ended up having six or seven right whales, around us right here, right at the edge of the Hudson Canyon. And so this was a few days before Memorial Day. And if, you know, the Hudson Canyon Memorial Day weekend is insane. It’s a parking lot of boats, so we were like, we need to make sure that people know about this. We weren’t going to be on shore for another few days. So we used the sat. We used Starlink or whatever to get a report to Danielle, and she sent it to all the people. And Noah sent out an aerial flight a few days later. And over the course of the next week, they found 45 right whales on the Hudson Canyon. They do they not expect to see right whales on the canyon for any real duration over the course of the summer. For most of the summer, they had 80, 82 different right whales right on the mid Atlantic canyon. There were a few sporadic sightings before us from research vessels, but as far as I know, we were the first substantial, like, group observation of right whales here in the mid Atlantic. That led to that bigger feeding group, discovery here, which is super crazy. And it’s a big data set for that. That just gives them more questions to try to answer this summer to see if it’ll happen again. -Chris This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 80 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.
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Tales of Saving Whales – Jenna D.
Tell Us About Yourself I’m Jenna, a 30 year old marine educator at the New England Aquarium. I am also a writer, influencer and self proclaimed nerd. Where did your whale love start? Growing up in New England, my love for whales has always been a life-long passion for me. My family would go out…
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Whales, Tons of Them! – 8/7/08
We had an amazing passage from P-Town to Maine. It took about 30 hours in light winds. Near the Cape was the first sighting of whales. They were in pods just feeding off the abundant supplies of fish in the marine sanctuary. Whale watching boats were all over and, although they got their sightings, these…
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Rare Sighting of a North Atlantic Right Whale – 31/3/15
I went out whale watching from Boston, and we were so lucky, we found a Right Whale, (or it found us near Stellwagen Point) with only 300-600 left in the world it was once of my luckiest sightings, once the whale was spotted we had to leave as the safety zone is 500 metres. This…