Right Whales

One day last week when Kay and I encountered our regular birding friend Ann at the Park entrance, she reported seeing a right whale off the tip of Halibut Point. The whale seemed lethargic and was probably still close by. Don was out at the grout pile monitoring the situation. They were concerned that it might be entangled in fishing gear. We congratulated her on the sighting and hurried on to what we hoped would be our first glimpse of a right whale, a once-common creature in the Seven Seas that was hunted nearly to extinction.

Rockport Harbormaster arriving,
Crane Beach and Ipswich in the background

We found Don at the grout pile as he was guiding the Rockport Harbormasters to the scene by cell phone from the promontory. Scott and Rosemary had made quick time over from Town to assess the whale's situation and relay its position to the monitoring agencies that track and rescue endangered marine mammals. 

The Harbormasters confirmed that this was a right whale, but did not notice any entanglements that might be impeding its movement. They passed the word on to the U. S. Coast Guard station in Gloucester, to the NOAA Whale Center, and to the Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF). All news about this species is valued as the whales move north in their spring migration.

The pair of whales skim feeding in Ipswich Bay
Rockport Harbormaster photo

As they watched another whale joined the first. Clearly the two were communicating at considerable distance through the water. They continued swimming languidly at the surface, their exhale spouts much smaller than if they had been deep diving.

Right whale

This (to us) unexpected floating behavior called for investigation on the website of the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. I found that the peculiarities of this animal's appearance and activity match perfectly, form and function correlating in another of the natural world's splendid evolutions. The right whale's enormous mouth houses a forest of baleen that filters miniscule zooplankton from the water in quantities prodigious enough to sustain its great bulk. The large paddle-shaped fins and tail help it drift through concentrations of these organisms, gulping and straining the microscopic prey. To accomplish this the whale's great head may compose a third of its body length. Those languid movements were its normal surface feeding pattern.

Right whale during the month of March in Cape Cod Bay
Photo from the Center for Coastal Studies website

A DMF spotter plane was soon overhead identifying the whales and plotting their movements north from Cape Cod Bay through the hazards of entanglement with fishing gear and collisions with vessels in shipping lanes. The highly individualized patterns of white callused skin allows monitors to name and monitor each individual. The spotters also provide information that can shape conservation restrictions while the whales are concentrated in particular areas. 

Photographed from above in its natural environment the whale takes on a rightfully graceful look impossible to compose in the drawing.