humpback whale ~ 09/15/14 ~ Pacific Grove Shoreline Park

humpback whale

Megaptera novaeangliae

We've had an extraordinary showing of humpback whales in the Monterey Bay recently, and today was the best so far!  The Monterey Bay Whale Watch states 70 humpbacks were spotted in the a.m., with 79 midday, and 84 (a heck of a lot!) on a bonus evening tour (as is shown here with that whale watching boat that got way too close).  Most of the road (Oceanview to Sunset) along PG's Shoreline Park was unusually crowded with landlubbers and several seriously ginormous camera lenses that likely cost more than my car, all pointing towards the water.  It was a great show.  Without binoculars, we could easily spot 4 very active areas (lots of blows) that didn't seem to move much.  Usually, the activity drifts or disappears after a few minutes.  This apparently lasted for hours.  Very cool.

Kinda crazy, and just goes to show how ignorant I can be sometimes, but humpback whales are still listed as federally endangered.  Ya.  No kidding.  That surprised me.  They were delisted from IUCN's Vulnerable status to Least Concern in 2008.

Here are extra humpback whale links: SIMoN Special Status Species, Marine Species Identification Portal, Marine Bio, Society for Marine Mammalogy, and Wild Whales (out of British Columbia).

I should mention that there were also 200 long-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus capensis), with 1500 seen 2 days ago, September 13, 2014.  Amazing.

gray whale ~ 01/21/12 ~ Rec Trail

gray whale
Eschrichtius robustus
for more information click here, here, and here

Yep, these are not the best pictures. It's really challenging to get decent photos of whales, btw, at least with my slow, poor-zoom, point-and-shoot. You can see the mottled back of the whale just to the right of the man in the second picture. This whale was incredibly close to the shore and was moving north around the Peninsula. Considering Nature ID is essentially my personal nature journal, I wanted to record the date and species of this particular whale sighting. I borrowed a marine mammal book from a friend that had cute little graphics of how one is supposed to distinguish between different cetaceans based on the shape of their spray. Ha! A couple times a year I spot various whales in the distance from home, mainly thanks to numerous whale watching boats that circle around any whales in the Bay like sharks. This time, it was thanks to a crowd of folks on the Rec Trail all pointing their cameras that we thought to stop and look. It's been a few years since I've seen a gray whale so close to the shore. The last time (unfortunately, I never recorded when), I was able to run alongside a close-to-the-shore gray from the Monterey Bay Aquarium all the way through Cannery Row, past the Plaza Hotel, and to San Carlos Beach. I've included numerous links above, because there seems to be some conflicting online information about the status of gray whales.

Risso's dolphins
Grampus griseus

From our office window this morning I noticed the familiar, large disturbance in the bay waters - it looked like the v-shaped wake of a massive cruise ship, with a smattering of large, grey dorsal fins and spouts of white water. We quickly grabbed the camera and binoculars and ran out to the balcony to watch these dolphins. We estimate that there were almost a hundred individuals in this particular group. They were porpoising, spouting, breaching, and fluke waving, moving northward, and then seemed to stop right in front of us to feed. There was a large flock of gulls on the water surface, too.

I still vividly recall 2 years ago, witnessing a dolphin group at least 10 times this size, as far as I could see left to right, heading south towards the Monterey Bay Aquarium, during a pretty pink sunrise with a handful of boats tagging along; too bad I didn't think to take a picture back then. We like to quip to guests that the easiest way we spot whales and such in the bay is to keep a lookout for any congregation of whale watching boats. In 2009, I saw only 1 humpback from our balcony in late April without the aid of grouped boats, which was disappointing after we had numerous whale and dolphin sightings in 2008.

Even though we borrowed a cetacean book from a friend and learned about the identifying characteristics of spouts shapes, we had to reference one of the whale watching boat sites to deduce that it was a Risso's dolphin that we saw this morning. In addition to having poor zoom quality it's been drizzling, so my pictures aren't very good. At the very least, I'm glad to be recording our dolphin observation on this blog.