Today we had some great active feeding behaviors. The entire reason behind why the whales come here in the first place is to feed and seeing the variety in their feeding habits is fascinating.
Kick feeding is a particular behavior that I find interesting because it has many stages most of which we do not see, but the parts that we do see are very active and awesome. Above and below are stages to kick feeding that show the fluke as a weapon slapping it at the surface to stun the prey.
Also, today was a nice fluke shot day because the whales were lifting their tails nice and high out of the water showing off the variety of black and white patterns on the bottom sided of the flukes.
Here is a shot of Northstar's ventral fluke, this whale has scars right in front of its dorsal fin that look like it had been hit by a boat or entangled in some fishing gear.
2 pm Trip - Leah
Didn't know what to expect for the afternoon trip but the wind picked up a little bit and so did the behaviors of the whales. Some of the unexpected behaviors were from whales that don't usually show off.
While on our way offshore we found plenty of birds and listening to the pitter patter of their feet hitting the water as they took off was really neat to listen to but as we continued off in the distance we saw some splashing. We passed by a few whales on our way out to the splashing to find a minke whale breaching.
It is not every day that we see this, not even every season do we see this so this was quite the sight to see. It breached over and over and was just the greatest thing to see. As it started to tire it was still swimming with bursts of energy at the surface with some impressive speed.
And as quickly as the behavior started it stopped just as quickly. So as it slowed down and went back to its usual quick surfacings we continued on to retrace our steps and find the other whales that were also in the area.
Northstar was still traveling around in the area and giving us some great looks and we also found a finback whale that was passing through. We got a quick glimpse of the finback and then moved onto another group of humpbacks.
This is one of my favorite photos, a whale completely out of the water just as happy as can be. This turned out to be Spoon and her 2015 calf. They were extremely active, even mom was getting in on the fun. They both were breaching, flipper slapping, lobtailing the whole nine yards. We saw so many high activity behaviors it was fantastic.
Here you can see Spoon's calf has its tail out of the water while mom rolls lifting her flipper out of the water ready to smack it back down at the surface.
Spoon's calf also shows us just how powerful even a calf can be while lobtailing. Flippers are out under the water to anchor the calf at the surface while it powerfully lifts its tail and causes this amazing whoosh of water.
Even a little synchronized flipper slapping occurred between mom and calf. Spoon is closest in the photo and they both lifted their flippers together.
Spoon even tail breached at one point in time and after that went back to her more serious adult behaviors, play time was over for mom but the calf continued to show off and gave us the best show.
Spoon going on a dive and starting the more regular up and down dive pattern, back to searching for food so she can provide for her calf.
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