I recently spent a weekend with my adult daughters. My youngest wanted to attend a music festival in Rhode Island. One of her favorite bands, and one that I have become familiar with because of her, was headlining. She asked me to go and since her sister, my oldest, lives in Rhode Island, we had a place to stay. An opportunity to spend quality time with both of my daughters, as neither lives with my wife and me anymore, was hard not to seize.
We arrived at my daughter’s apartment Thursday night. My son-in-law had to work Friday and one of the girls would also be working remotely. This meant some free time for me, and I jumped on it. Shortly after my son-in-law left for work in the morning, I set out for Plymouth to hop on a whale watch boat. The 90-minute or so drive got me there in time to make the 9 a.m. trip. The boat goes out of Plymouth Harbor, across Cape Cod Bay and out to Stellwagen Bank, a marine sanctuary known to attract whales. A trip on the same boat back in May yielded me my first Atlantic white-sided dolphins. I was hoping to see the dolphins again and get better photographs. And, since it was later in the summer, maybe there would be some good pelagic birds around.
Unfortunately, there were no dolphins to be had on this trip. Also, for whatever reasons, there was not much bird activity. We were close enough to land to have some gulls around, but I only saw a few great shearwaters on the food-rich waters. We were not far off Race Point, at the tip of Provincetown. Race Point is well-known for incredible land-based sightings of rare oceanic birds. Not this day, though. Aside from the few shearwaters and some Wilson’s storm-petrels, I did see some red-necked phalaropes on the water. The phalaropes were out of their brilliant breeding plumage, but still cool to see.
Red-necked phalaropes. © S. Weiss
Common mola, or ocean sunfish. © S. Weiss
The main diet of molas consists of soft prey, such as jellyfish.
On the way out, I spotted a common mola sunning itself at the surface ahead of us. A shout out got the captain’s attention, and he did a brief turnaround for all on board to see. It didn’t take too long to spot our first humpback whale. Fortunately, the whales adequately made up for the lack of dolphins and birds. I believe we saw about a dozen humpbacks, including three pairs of mothers and calves. The whales did all they could to entertain the boat crowd. There were plenty of tail raises, flipper waving and a few breaches. One of the first whales we saw did a 100% breach, coming completely (head to tail) out of the water. That whale wasn’t even on our radar and its breach was so unexpected that I didn’t get a picture of it. I did take as many tail photos as possible of different whales that I could. The underside of each humpback’s tail is unique to that individual. I will share these photos with the Happywhale database. They, in turn, will share any matching individual identifications with me.
Humpback whales putting on displays. © S. Weiss
Clockwise from left: breaching, flipper waving and tail raising.
Humpback whale mother and calf pair. © S. Weiss
Clockwise from left: mother along the calf’s right side, head of mother baring scars from an old propeller strike and calf swimming alongside boat.
It would have been nice to spend the whole day out there with the whales, but the boat had another trip scheduled for 2 p.m. The ride back was nice, but uneventful until just before we got back into the bay. The captain made a drastic power down of the engine, similar to a car driver slamming on his brakes. I’ve been doing these trips long enough to know that this meant one of two things- either another vessel was dangerously crossing in front of us, or he spotted something on the water. Luckily, it was the former. Even though I was probably the only passenger still scanning the water, I had not seen why he stopped the boat until the naturalist shouted out, “Sea turtle!”
I turned my binoculars to the brown object floating at the surface expecting to see a loggerhead sea turtle, but as soon as I saw the longitudinal ridges on its shell, I shouted, “Leatherback!” This was my first-ever leatherback sea turtle. Everyone was excited to see a sea turtle, but after only seeing loggerheads before, I was elated to finally see a live leatherback. The naturalist, equally excited, exclaimed that a sea turtle here is rare, and that a leatherback is extremely rare.
Leatherback sea turtle. © S. Weiss
Leatherbacks are a globally endangered species. They are the largest of all the world’s turtle species. Its shell (carapace) is not hard, but rubbery and has ridges instead of scutes. Just like the common mola, its main diet consists of soft prey, like jellyfish. This one was grazing on a large jellyfish (center photo).
The turtle made my day. Not even the traffic on the ride back to my daughters brought me down.
Comments
Post a Comment