Thank you so much for this post. Very interesting and I'm so glad you nailed it. We live on Cape Neddick Harbor, have a boat, and spend time looking for whales and marine life and now will be obsessed with finding this creature! 😊
We'll never see it ,of course, but we'll have lots of fun looking for it!
Linda Scotland
-----Original Message-----
From: maine-birds@googlegroups.com <maine-birds@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Steve Mirick
Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2022 10:01 AM
To: nhbirds <nhbirds@googlegroups.com>; Massbird <massbird@world.std.com>; maine-birds <maine-birds@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [Maine-birds] Mystery Whale from boat trip - IDENTIFIED!
For those of you who read to the end of my post the other day about our fishing trip, you'll notice I included the report of a strange small whale:
> Small Whale sp. - Very strange looking small whale with not much (or
> no) dorsal fin and no significant blow roughly south of the Isles of
> Shoals. Came up 3 or 4 times. Not sure what this was, but it didn't
> have a dorsal fin like a Minke.
The big excitement was from the remote possibility that this could possibly be THE incredibly rare Pygmy Sperm Whale that had recently beached itself briefly on Salisbury Beach, but freed itself as the tide came in:
I didn't think there was any chance that we would ever figure this mystery out, but fortunately, Leo Mckillop got some nice photos of the whale. I sent them off to Melanie White, a Right Whale biologist (in the winter) and naturalist on the Granite State Whale Watch (in the
summer) out of Rye, NH. And she quickly and enthusiastically responded that it was "FINKE"!!
Turns out "Finke" is the name that was given to this uniquely marked Minke Whale. "Finke" (for finless Minke) is a rare Minke Whale that has no dorsal fin; likely lost in a boat collision early in its life. It has been seen off and on off the NH/MA/ME coastline for the last 10 years with the first sighting from back in 2011!!! All previous sightings were from summer months, so it was very cool to actually document this animal during winter months!
So.....not a Pygmy Sperm Whale....or an even more rare "Beaked" Whale. Just a Minke Whale. Other than the lack of a dorsal fin, you can see the unique scar markings. Particularly the pale gray/white scar patch on the left side of the body in this photo:
And a couple of other photos:
Here is a blog post from Melanie White back in 2018 when they spotted this individual for the first time in a couple of years. Scroll down a little bit to see their photo and her comments:
http://granitestatewhalewatch.blogspot.com/2018/06/
Steve Mirick
Bradford, MA
--
Maine birds mailing list
http://groups.google.com/group/maine-birds
https://sites.google.com/site/birding207
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Maine birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to maine-birds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/maine-birds/926a7120-f62d-686d-6e0b-c91917132a5d%40comcast.net.
0 comments:
Post a Comment