Thursday, July 2, 2015 whale watches 9 am and 2 pm

9 am trip - Leah

As you can see above our humpback whales occasionally have some tag alongs.  This young humpback whale has some barnacles attached to its fluke and what's neat is that these barnacles are not parasitic.  They are not causing any harm to this whale they are just along for the ride trying to collect plankton in the water as the whale transports it through the water.  Also, these barnacles are passed down to the calf from the mother which is one way we can track a family history of these humpbacks.  

Here is another young humpback that has been wandering around Stellwagen Bank for quite some time this summer.  Neither of the whales above have names yet, they are both juveniles, still young whales. 

And here you can see a large grey seal that has been around and always stares at us as if it's confused as to why we would watch it.  

2 pm trip - Leah

Every once in awhile we get some die hard birders who come out with us so I try to collect photos of the seabirds we have offshore.  Above is a Cory shearwater one of our common pelagic seabirds. These birds spend all of there time offshore, only returning inshore for breeding purposes.  

Here is a photo of one of our finbacks in the area.  Sometimes we get some nice looks at these whales feeding in their signature circular surface feeding.  

Our activity increased as we came across some other humpbacks we got some great looks at breaches from the whales and some rolling and flipper slapping.  

This photo is pretty neat because the calf who is breaching is pointing its flipper at the Pilgrim Monument on Provincetown.  Showing and teaching our passengers where the pilgrims originally landed.  

Here we got a brief glimpse of a minke whale, one of our smallest baleen whales that we see offshore. They are definitely a very under appreciated whale, but small whales are so hard to watch and keep track of, so we tend to put our energy and efforts into larger whales that spend more time at the surface.  

We ended our trip with a large group of 5 humpback whales that were traveling close together but we are not sure as to why they were traveling and hanging out together.  

Also, above we see a Wilson's storm petrel which is the smallest seabird we watch, they are about the size of a pigeon and flit at the surface of the water.