Friday, July 27, 2012

Lunge Feeding Fin

Hello everyone, what a great day we had today!  This morning we ran offshore towards the Bank and we found a large finback whale, a new individual for this season!  We got some great looks and on our way back in we passed another fin whale.

Large finback we found off South Wolf

On our afternoon trip we spent some time with a finback whale close to Whitehorse but there was a lot of boat traffic so we decided to venture a little further out and we noticed some large splashes towards Eastern Wold so we made our way over and found a fin whale lunge feeding!  We spent around 45 minutes with this whale and he would lunge feed, breath a few times and pick up speed (we would see the fluke prints at the surface) and then he would lunge feed again.  We must have seen 10-15 lunge feeds but with very few birds feeding in the area it was very difficult to predict where he would come up so I wasn't able to get any great pics.

First finback we stopped with

Lunge feed!  You can see the extended ventral pleats

This was the lunger!

Another lunge 

Of course we stopped with seals and eagles on both trips as well!

I am sure you can guess what he is doing


Greater shearwater

Cheers,
Danielle


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