Whales on the 4th!

We hope everyone has a fun and safe 4th. Bar Harbor was quite busy with 4th of July festivities.
The whale watch had two successful and exciting trips.  Passengers enjoyed a break from the heat as well as the opportunity to see a great deal of wildlife!

Both the morning and afternoon trips had a number of whales and other marine life. The 8:30 trip had numerous puffin sightings. Offshore they found four fin whales!

On the 1:30 trip the boat spotted three to four fin whales and two humpbacks! The humpbacks were identified as "Triton" and "Whistler". These whales were first sighted and documented for scientific research in 1981 and 1976! Other marine mammal sightings included harbor porpoise, grey seals and harbors seals.

The day wrapped up with our fireworks bay cruise and a spectacular firework show!

Whale watching June 10th-30th.

Well, we have certainly had a wonderful start to our season this year. Our travels offshore continue to be fantastic and full of marine life. Over the last few weeks we have sighted three large whale species: fin, humpback, and minke. Other sightings include: harbor and grey seals, harbor porpoise, Atlantic white-sided dolphins, and basking sharks!

Humpbacks sighted and identified in the last few weeks:

Flyer
Triton
Spar and 2013 calf

The whale watch continues to see fin whale in groups of 2-4 feeding deep in the water column.  However, considering that fin whale can be an elusive species, we've continued to get amazing looks. Sometimes the whales have surfaced near the boat or moved in for a close approach. When watching whales we operate under guidelines established by NOAA fisheries. Our company is a participant of the Whale Sense program.  This way we observe whales safely and do not pose a threat. Each year our naturalists and captains undergo training so we can help promote responsible whale watching practices and ocean stewardship.

Here is a video from one of our trips a couple of weeks ago:

Our company continues to work with Allied Whale. We carry research assistants so Allied Whale can continue to photograph fin and humpback whales for photo-identification purposes. Fin whales, unlike humpbacks, are little more difficult to identify in the field. The data helps scientists to learn more about whales. This way we can help protect them and learn more about the health of their habitat-the Gulf of Maine.

The boat went out today, July 3rd, after several days of staying docked due to rough and foggy offshore conditions.  We will continue to keep you posted and hope you can join us on a trip!

June 1st - June 10th Whale Watches

WOW this season has been off to a fantastic start so far! Our first trips were dominated by some great sightings of fin whales (see previous blog post). On June 1st, we also had some great sightings of a friendly fin whale. Although fin whales can be difficult to watch, because they are so fast and can stay underwater on dives for 20+ minutes, absolutely nothing compares to seeing a fin whale up close. Their chevron (the white, swirling pattern visible on the right side of animals) is just beautiful, and seeing them close makes you really appreciate just how BIG these animals can be!

We then had a few days of bad weather (lots of rain, fog, and high seas). The next day that we got out was June 4th. And oh what a day it was! This was most certainly one of our best early season whale watches EVER. I know that it was the most whales that I have ever seen out here. And the 4th had another surprise as well -- humpbacks!!! In total we saw eight humpbacks, five fin whales, two minkes, and one unknown whale (just saw the blow a few times). The humpbacks were all feeding, and most of them were traveling in pairs. We saw Zorro and Ditto traveling together, as well as Vee and Viper. The other humpbacks we could not identify, as they did not show their flukes. We got some fantastic looks at bubble cloud and open mouth surface feeding. This is by far my favorite behavior to see. Something about seeing a whale come up with its mouth wide open and straining out 1,000 gallons of water is really, really cool.

Zorro (on his side) and Ditto coming up in a bubble cloud.

June 5th brought more feeding! Passengers were treated to views of 2-3 fin whales, and also one humpback whale, identified as Platform, feeding using bubble clouds. In addition, we got some quick looks at a minke whale lunge feeding at the surface! We hardly ever see this, so it was really neat! The next day, June 6th, brought about an abrupt change. Where before we had been seeing lots of Northern gannets and great and sooty shearwaters, on this day we saw hundreds of Wilson's storm petrels. There were also large schools of fish that continually broke the surface of the water, making for a really cool sight. We had a harder time finding whales, but did eventually find a fin whale. The fin whale passed right next to our boat at the beginning of the sighting. Additionally, the whale displayed some lunge feeding behavior close to the boat. After that, we had trouble keeping up with it. Eventually, we moved on to try to find some other marine life. Although we did not find any more whales, we did find a basking shark! These awesome fish can grow to be 40 feet long, and feed exclusively on plankton. We got amazing looks at this huge, prehistoric animal, which you could see almost perfectly underwater.

Large schools of fish at the surface of the water.

Basking shark. The picture does not display how clearly we could see the animal.  The light green patch by the bottom of the picture is the shark's open mouth!

Awesome view of a fin whale's blow holes as it passes right next to the boat.

The humpbacks were back on June 7th. Our first whale of the day was a fin whale that came up once before disappearing. We then spotted another blow in the distance, and headed out to see that whale. It was Platform again. This time he was traveling, but came up very close to the boat several times, and gave everyone on board fantastic views of his flukes. Also while traveling, we saw at least one minke whale. The passengers were really on the ball with spotting; they spotted the minke, seals, and harbor porpoise. It was another beautiful day on the water!

Platform

A good look at Platform's blowholes. You can even see the tubercles on his head!

The weekend brought about lots of rain, fog and rough seas again. Trips were canceled Saturday and Sunday, but we got back out on the water Monday June 10th. I know that I've said this about every trip so far, but it was fantastic! There were lots and lots of whales in the area. We saw at least five humpback whales and six fin whales. In addition, we saw a whole bunch of seals and porpoise, all feeding on the plentiful bait in the area. The humpbacks put on quite a show. We saw Tab and Zorro traveling together with an unknown whale. They surfaced near the boat a few times and gave everyone fantastic views. We also got some good looks at fin whales.

Finback whale jaw. Photo copyright of Stealth Vader Photography.

Humpback whale Tab. Photo copyright of Stealth Vader Photography.

The birds have also been fantastic. We have been stopping at Petit Manan Island at the beginning of each trip to see the puffins and other nesting seabirds. Some of you may have read in the news about how puffins are washing up dead throughout their range. Luckily, we are still seeing a lot at the island. We have also seen numbers of common and Arctic terns, razorbills, common murres and eider ducks. Additionally, there have been TONS of Wilson's storm petrels, large numbers of both great and sooty shearwaters, many Northern gannets, and several Northern fulmars.

Atlantic puffin. Photo courtesy of Stealth Vader Photography.

Arctic tern. Photo courtesy of Stealth Vader Photography.

Northern fulmar

All in all, it has been a fantastic start to the season! We have a couple of bad weather days ahead of us, but hope to be back out on the water soon. We hope to see you soon!! Keep checking back here for updates as our season progresses.

Whale Season 2013 off to a great start!

Happy 2013 Whale Season from Bar Harbor Whale Watch! We have been so excited to get this summer kicked off, and now that all is underway, we have some great news to share. After a weekend of rough weather, our first puffin and whale watching trip went out this past Monday the 27th. It was a huge success!

 We had a beautiful day on the water as we headed offshore on the Bay King III, one of our three jet-powered catamarans. On our way out, we got some beautiful views of the islands around Frenchman Bay and of Schoodic Peninsula. We then arrived at Petit Manan Island for our first 2013 puffin visit. The island was full of life, and we saw tons of puffins! All looked very sharp in their breeding season colors, sporting famously bright orange bills. It was easy to see why these little birds are often called sea parrots. In addition to the puffins, there were several other species of seabirds present in really impressive numbers. We saw many common terns and razorbills on and around the island. It was great to check out Petit Manan's lighthouse, Maine's second tallest, and see the set-ups bird researchers on the island use to study these animals. We're looking forward to checking in with these researchers throughout the season to hear realtime updates about the nesting populations of puffins and other birds. 

After we left Petit Manan, we headed out to an offshore area called the Ballpark. The Ballpark is generally a great area for larger whales to feed, so it's the perfect place to look for them. Since this was our first trip of the season, though, we couldn't be sure where whales would be. We spent some time cruising the Ballpark, scanning as we traveled, until some passengers on the second deck spotted the first blow of the season! We stopped the boat and quickly all aboard saw the huge animal less than 200 yards from the Bay King III - a fin whale! We stayed with the whale for a while, watching it hang at the surface and dive down. As it went on deeper dives and lifted more of its body out of the water, our Allied Whale researcher on board, Jesse, was able to get photographs that may be used to identify this whale. Perhaps this finback has visited with us before! It was a truly beautiful animal. Though all fin whales have white coloring on the right sides of their bodies, this animal seemed lighter than usual on its left as well. This meant we could see it really clearly when it was hanging right beneath the surface- an amazing sight! Last year the fin whales in our area seemed to arrive later than usual and in lower numbers, so it was so great to see one of these guys on our very first trip out. It was a fantastic day!

Our second trip of the season on Tuesday the 28th was just as successful as the first. The Bay King III went out and had another great visit with puffins, terns, razorbills and more at Petit Manan. Again, we headed out to the Ballpark in search of whales and found a beautiful fin whale! The whale went on longer dives, but kept coming up right near the boat. On our last looks, it swam right across the bow, giving all aboard amazing views. Our Allied Whale researcher for Tuesday, Teressa, got more great pictures to use for photo identification. Some of our crew suspect that this is the same individual we saw on Monday, so hopefully Allied Whale can analyze the pictures from both trips and figure out if this is the same friendly animal. Either way, it was a gorgeous whale to watch! 

We are so happy the season has gotten off to such a great start. We can't wait to keep getting offshore and seeing more seabirds and marine mammals. Our first two trips bode for a great summer and fall full of incredible sea life!

-Below are photos from the 5/28/13 whale watch-

2012 Season!

Happy 2013 everyone!!! I wanted to apologize to everyone for the lack of updates to this blog this past year. I hope that you all had a fantastic 2012; I know that all of us at Bar Harbor Whale Watch sure did! It was a pretty great season, and I figured that I should share a quick summary of our summer. We saw a total of eight different species of cetaceans (Cetacea is the order that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises). In addition, we saw both gray and harbor seals on just about every trip, plus dozens of species of seabirds.

The season started off a little slow. The weather and seas were beautiful, but for the first part of June we had trouble finding many whales. We did, however, come across Atlantic white-sided dolphins on numerous occasions. Usually this is a species that we see later in the summer and fall on only about 10% of the trips, but this year we had them fairly often throughout the entire season. They put on some great shows, and were always a crowd (and crew!) favorite. One day we were absolutely surrounded by hundreds of white-sided dolphins, leaping into the air and riding the bow waves created by our boat, literally just feet away from passengers looking over the side. 

Typically, during the early part of the season we see a lot of fin, or finback, whales. As the second largest animal to ever roam this planet, a 70 foot fin whale is always an impressive sight. Fin whales this year were sometimes hard to find, but boy did we get some great looks when we came across them! One of my absolute favorite memories from this season was on a day that we were watching a fin whale that we had seen for several days in a row nicknamed ‘Tiger Stripes’ for the series of vertical scars running down his right side under and behind his dorsal fin.

Tiger Stripes had been down on a dive for just over ten minutes, and everyone was starting to get anxious looking for where he was going to pop up. Suddenly a bunch of passengers began to point off the port (left) side of the boat and exclaim excitedly. Just about fifteen feet off the side of our boat, a green shape was rising towards the surface. It quickly became apparent that this white shape was the jaw of a fin whale. For those of you who haven’t been lucky enough to get a good look at the right side of a fin whale, it is an absolutely beautiful sight. Fin whales are one of the only asymmetrically colored mammals, and have an exquisite white, swirling pattern known as the chevron on the right side of their head. This chevron is one of the things that researchers use to identify individual fin whales. The white in the chevron appears light green in the super productive waters of the Gulf of Maine, and that was what we were seeing rapidly rising from the depths. The whale exploded at the surface, so close to us that we could see the entire whale stretched out next to the boat. We could even see the massive flukes beating near the top of the water. Everyone was captivated by the whale; I was near tears with excitement! Then, out of nowhere, a second whale let out a 20 foot high blow directly behind the first. Everyone had been so focused on the first whale that no one had seen the second. We had no idea where the other whale had come from; we had been watching Tiger Stripes traveling alone for several dive sequences before this happened. But still, it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

And then the humpbacks came. We saw over thirty individual humpback whales this season, several on multiple days. This included five different Allied Whale Adopt-A-Whales. The adoptable whales that we saw this year were Breakers, Canine, Gemini (one of the first ever named whales, first identified back in 1976), Sonogram and Triton. Humpbacks are probably the best known of the species of whales that we typically see. Described by Herman Melville (the author of Moby Dick) as “the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales”, the humpbacks we saw this season did not disappoint. We saw just about every behavior imaginable, from tail lobbing to close approaches to breaching (jumping clear out of the water).

This year we also saw a bought of jaw-dropping feeding behavior that is very rarely witnessed. Humpbacks are famous for their cooperative feeding methods, including a tactic known as bubble-net or bubble-cloud feeding. Whales using this method work cooperatively to herd fish into a concentrated bait ball. One whale emits a loud feeding call designed to scare prey towards the surface, and another whale expels a ring of bubbles around the mass of fish. Then, all of the whales rush through the fish with their mouths wide open, exploding to the surface in a mass of fish, whale, and baleen. For several days at the end of July the humpbacks in the area delighted us by surface feeding, including several amazing displays of bubble-net feeding. In these instances, we would see the light green ring of bubbles rise to the surface, and then herring would begin to jump, and were closely followed by whales with their mouths wide open.

One day we saw a group of eight humpbacks cooperatively surface feeding for the entire day. On each trip that we went on, we saw the whales come up feeding time after time after time. We got absolutely fantastic views. When I showed the pictures to friends and family, no one believed that they were taken off the coast of Maine! It was phenomenal.

The 2012 season featured some more unusual sightings of whales as well. We saw several different North Atlantic right whale individuals. North Atlantic right whales are one of the most endangered large whales in the world, with only about 450 individuals left. Therefore, any sighting of a right whale is very exciting, and we counted ourselves very lucky this year. Our first sighting was of a mom and calf pair.

2012 was a rough year for right whale calves. Females give birth in the waters off of Georgia and Florida, and teams of researchers do aerial surveys looking to document every right whale calf born. On average, about twenty calves are seen each year. In 2012, only six were seen (luckily, over a dozen right whale calves have been seen in the 2012-2013 calving season so far – check out pictures here). Only one of those mom-calf pairs was seen on the feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy. Some lucky passengers and crew members on our boat had a special treat of seeing that mom-calf pair! We also saw a large male right whale known as Houdini, so named because he has escaped multiple entanglements in fishing gear. Unfortunately, right whales often fall victim to human activities, usually either by becoming entangled in fishing gear or being hit by vessels. These events are a big part of the reason as to why right whale populations are not recovering at a fast pace.

This season we were also lucky enough to see a sei whale. Sei whales are the third largest whale species by length, and are very poorly understood. They are usually seen in deeper waters farther offshore, so it was a real treat to get to see one this year.

We also got to see pilot whales on two trips this season, including the last trip of the season!! These large members of the dolphin family are always awesome to see, and are the favorite species of many of our crew members. On the last trip of the season we saw a large group of over fifty pilot whales, with many closely approaching the boat and putting on quite a show for us!!

We spent a lot of time this year out by Mount Desert Rock (MDR), the island research station of marine mammal research group Allied Whale. MDR also happens to be the most remote lighthouse on the eastern seaboard. These trips by MDR gave passengers a unique look at an aspect of marine mammal research, as we often got to see Allied Whale scientists hard at work! In addition, MDR is home to large colonies of both gray and harbor seals, so we often got to get really good looks at these marine mammals!

It was a good year for the birds as well!! We saw puffins and other seabirds like razorbills, common murres, black guillemots, Northern gannets, and terns on just about every trip! During our morning puffin watches, we got some excellent looks at these unique seabirds, and also got to talk with researchers who were living on Petit Manan Island and doing research on the seabirds that nested there. In addition, this year we implemented a brand new Puffin Cam! Researchers on Petit Manan placed cameras near locations where puffins were commonly seen, and antennas on our boat picked up the signal and broadcasted the video on the TVs in our cabins. It worked really great this year, and we look forward to the continued use of the Puffin Cam!

One thing that I would like to mention is the record water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine this summer. While this might be seen as a good thing for swimmers on Sand Beach, unfortunately it is not-so-good for many of the organisms that inhabit our waters. This summer there were reports of both a bowhead whale and a beluga whale in the Gulf of Maine. These whales are both most often seen in cold Arctic waters. Bowheads are an ice-dependent whale, and this was the first ever report of one in the Gulf of Maine. Most likely the animal was a young individual that got lost with the decreasing ice in the Arctic. The effects of climate change were definitely seen throughout the Gulf of Maine. For some further reading featuring Bar Harbor’s very own Diver Ed, check out this article.

I’d like to end this post with a promise to do a better job updating this blog in 2013!! Also, I've included some of the pictures that our crew took this past season, but if you would like to see all of the pictures, check out our Flickr page! Everyone here at Bar Harbor Whale Watch hopes that you all have a FANTASTIC year, and we hope to see you sometime this summer!