Tag Archives: calf behavior

Whales Everywhere on Tuesday Afternoon

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Aloha,
The rainy weather caused us to cancel our early morning Whale Watches on Tuesday, but as soon as we could go out again, what we saw more than made up for the first part of the day. In fact, on our Whales and Cocktails Cruise, we saw so many different spouts as we were leaving the bay that we weren’t sure which direction to head (one of our favorite dilemmas)! Captain Shane decided to take us south and we were rewarded quickly with a very curious calf and his permissive Mom. Much to our delight, she let him investigate the boat at close range. We then saw a competitive pod of 6 whales charging across the surface. There was lots of trumpeting from these hard-breathing whales. After that, we saw another pod of Mom/Baby, and this time an escort surfaced with them. For a grand finale, Mom breached twice, and the baby got into the excitement too, breaching multiple times.Our onboard naturalist Angelica estimates that throughout the duration of the cruise we saw 35 different whales!
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Researchers have observed that Humpback calves are very playful, investigating all kinds of objects in their environment (including our boat), interacting with their moms, and even interacting with passing pods of dolphins. But for as many calves as we see in Hawaii during the winter, we never have observed the calves playing with each other. Though we’re not sure why this is, perhaps Mom won’t allow a calf that isn’t hers to approach because she doesn’t want to feed the wrong one.

Singing, Baby Pec Slaps, and Humphrey’s Story

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Aloha,

We had some great times on the water on Wednesday. Our 8:00 Breakfast with the Whales and our 3:00 Whales and Cocktails both departed from Anaeho’omalu on Manu Iwa. The whales seemed happy to see us as both trips report lots of sightings and too many surface activities to keep track of. When we deployed the hydrophone on each of those trips, we heard some very loud and clear singing and vocalizations. But it was on our 10:00 Whale Watch from Kawaihae that we saw a complete turn-around from the day before. On this trip we saw 14 whales, 4 breaches, 2 pec slaps and one double pec slap from a calf (we love to see calves attempt this maneuver — they look so uncoordinated and cute while lying on their backs, flipping their pectoral fins around). We saw 2 pods of Cow/Calf/Escorts and one competitive pod consisting of 2 males and a female (at least that’s what our naturalist Jonathan was able to infer, based on the whales’ behaviors). We had one close encounter, and one mugging on that trip, and we deployed the hydrophone twice. The first time, we heard lots of whales, but the second time the sounds were incredibly resonant which means our singing whale was pretty close by.

 

Join Ocean Sports for a Whale Watch Adventure. Call us at 886-6666 ext. 103 or visit www.hawaiioceansports.com to reserve your spot today.

 

Humpback Whale Fact of the Day: Yesterday, I promised to tell you the rest of the Humphrey the Humpback Whale story. After successfully luring Humphrey to the ocean in 1985, researchers were a little surprised to see him back in San Francisco Bay again in 1990. This time, he got stuck on a mud flat south of Candlestick Park. Rescuers from the Marine Mammal Center  and the US Coast Guard used a cargo net and a boat to free him. Then, he was guided out of the Bay to the ocean by a flotilla of boats behind him full of people banging on steel pipes (a Japanese fishing technique called “oikomi”). At the same time, those same attractive sounds of Humpbacks feeding that lured Humphrey out to sea in 1985 were broadcast from boats in front of Humphrey. It worked. Since then, Humphrey’s story has been memorialized in a number of children’s books, a movie and he even has a Facebook page!

 

Mahalo,

Captain Claire