Fin whales are still hanging around the south coast of São Miguel for our pleasure 🙂
This morning we saw two pairs of them, one being a mother and her calf. The baby looked really tiny compared to the mother, however when compared to our boat …well… it was close to its size!
Mother and calves humpback whales when migrate tend to be the last ones leaving the breeding grounds to reach the feeding grounds at high latitudes. Young individuals don’t have enough blubber, the fat layer, to cope with cold waters and this may be the reason for the delay. The same could apply to other baleen whales.
Humpback whale – Megaptera novaeangliae
Having that said, we saw a Humpback whale this afternoon! They are a pretty rare sighting in Sao Miguel, and she wasn’t making it easy for us. After 1,5 hours searching we finally found her, and I say “she” because most likely it was a female, due to the large size. The whale was first traveling between east to west and west to east, but when we finally found her she wasn’t moving much. She took some deeper dives showing the tail fluke, with an average dive time of 7 minutes.
Hopefully we will see her again tomorrow! P.S. Humpback whale photos of today are taken by Marylou Féat, one of our former Biologist guides 🙂