Dolphin Day

The coastal towns of Massachusetts were at the heart of the 19th century American whaling industry and, because America was the biggest participant in the trade, most of the wealth gained from whaling accrued there. The great Quaker whaling families (Folger, Macy, Starbuck etc.) were based in Nantucket but Boston was the financial capital where they invested their money and also where colleges and churches were founded on whale oil.

In the early days of small, locally-built wooden boats you could see right whales from the beach but soon the local grounds were exhausted and the New England whalers had to travel ever further afield; north to Greenland and even round the Horn and up the rim of the Pacific Ocean to the Galapagos, Hawaii and Alaska.

Today the Georges Bank and the ledges off the New England coast are the new whaling grounds for tourists. Whale-watch tours operate from Boston in Massachusetts and from Kennebunkport and Ipswich in New Hampshire. Eastwards, in the Gulf of Maine, boats go out from Portland, Boothbay Harbour and Bar Harbour and then, at Eastport, the deep water of the Bay of Fundy comes in close enough to watch from shore.

The local newspapers have been running a story that right whales may be breeding in the Gulf of Maine as well as the Bay of Fundy. One report says that 20 calves were produces last winter. The gestation period is 12 months so that mating and breeding takes place at the same place in mid-winter. These animals are extremely rare now with only a few hundred left, meaning that they have gone through a "genetic bottleneck" leaving them with a very small gene pool. Any breeding at all is exciting news. I would dearly love to catch a glimpse of one.


Seasons vary, but my own observation is that whales in general are harder to find in the high tourist season (before Labour Day) than they were 20 years ago. There could be many factors involved but high water temperatures must be one of them.

During our visit in August last year, all of the Bay of Fundy boats (from Maine and Canada) spent a couple of weeks chasing the same two minke whales while the Gulf of Maine had no whales at all. This week there is a humpback mother and calf off New Hampshire and a few minkes, and that's not a lot of whales. But we decided to part with our money and go out from Portland anyway.


The Odyssey Whale Watch Tour Co. operates a smart little boat from the tourist quay in Portland Maine. It can comfortably carry about 50 passengers swiftly out to the deep water quite so that trips last about four hours. They do not have the success rate of some of the other operators but offer a refund or a free trip if they let you down. It was a lovely day to be out so we were not too worried, but the signs looked good.

The sea was flat and visibility was excellent. We saw common seals in the harbour and soon passed a flock of small wading birds swimming in the sea. These phalaropes are extraordinary birds that spend most of their time out in the open ocean but breed ashore in the high Arctic. The females are brightly coloured while the males are camouflaged because they are "home-husbands". The hen takes the lead in courtship and lays the eggs but leaves the male to incubate them while she regains her fitness for a quick get-away. Arctic summers are short so a swift turn-around time can be crucial.

Phalaropes often follow whales so I took them to be a good omen. However, it soon became noticeable that there was not a lot of other surface activity going on. We saw few gulls, no auks, skuas or petrels, all of which chase the same food as the whales. We did see a few gannets that were probably chasing mackerel.


Another good indicator is the number of fishing boats over the deep water. When the feeding is good, the upwellings attract big commercial fish like tuna and swordfish and there can be a small city of boats out there; we saw three or four, otherwise all the boats were crewed by lobstermen.


A fellow passenger told me that this was his second trip on the boat. He had a free ticket due to seeing no whales on the last trip. "Looks like another no-show to me."  And so, as far as big cetaceans are concerned, it turned out to be.



After three hours, we had taken a big bite out of the bay, making an arc with about a 10 mile radius. It was very pleasant to be out on the water and I could have hung in there for hours more, but were were heading for home.

Suddenly the sound of the engines changed and we veered off to the north where the skipper had spotted some "commotion in the ocean". I could see gannets plunging and huge splashes so it looked like we might at least see some tuna feeding.

What we found was a sizeable school of Atlantic white-sided dolphins who gave us a half an hour of feverish activity. They did not seem to be hunting so much as playing and socialising, which is common with these highly intelligent, gregarious animals. The school consisted of males with big dorsal fins and smaller females with calves. They rode our bow-wave and then jumped in our wake as we left. They had made our day and saved the Odyssey Whale-watch Company a lot of money.

Red-necked phalaropes.

Postscript

Back on dry land, I am still reading Philip Hoare's "Leviathan" and I heard his new book, "The Sea Inside", being read aloud as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. My wife bought me a copy as soon as it came out and it topped the Guardian's Best Seller list this month. I'm going to take it to Maine with me next week. If you are at all interested in whales, or just love a good read, you have to read Philip Hoare.

While the girls went shopping, my son James and I went after sperm whales.

Cambridge is a long way from the sea, but it has its own whales. Most of them are in the University Zoology Department in Downing Street so we headed for there first. Unfortunately it was closed, but we took time to visit the fin whale that adorns the front of the building. I suppose the brutalist, concrete building was designed around the whale. Now the whale seems to be turning to concrete himself as the weather bleaches his framework.

We peeked through the museum's dusty windows to see stacks of crates. All of the stuffed animals and bones have been removed but whales and dolphins still hang from the ceiling. Through the grime, in an unlit room, it looked like the skeletons were swimming round in tank, like those poor orcas in American zoos.

There are two other mueums in Downing Street. The Sedgewick Museum has fossils and minerals, but no whales: the Anthropology Museum specialises in the Pacific Rim and has artefacts such as masks, totem poles and spears that relate to whales and whaling. I will spend a day there looking for whales in miniature.

The Whipple Museum is about the Histrory of Science. I bet they have some lamps that used to run on whale oil, but we were distracted by stacks of ghoulish medical equipment. I have an excuse to go back there too. But our primary traget was to get to the Scott Polar Institute.

I have driven past it often, but only been in once. From the road you can see a sculpture of Peter Scott (Robert Falcon Scott's son) as a boy, made by his mother. (There is another one of Peter posing as Peter Pan in London's Hyde Park.) By the front door there is a sinister looking gun that looks more industrial than any I have seen; like a tractor part rather than a weapon. It is a harpoon gun from a whaling ship and was made in the 1940s. That means that it was still being used when I was a young man.

Next to the gun there is a cauldron. It is not huge and could have been used to make witches' potions, or to boil up pig-swill on a farm, but it was actually kept on-board ships for rendering blubber. You can find them scattered around the old whaling stations such as the Falklands, Sychelles and South Georgia today. Imagine the thick, black, oily smoke generated by such a fire and the greasy chip-shop slime that would have adhered to the rails and discoloured the sails of whaling ships. Where would you get the wood to light a fire in any of those polar stations? You did not need to; whales and seals burn very well on their own.

Inside the Scott Polar Museum, white is the dominant colour. The current exhibition is about the Inuits and I found no reference to whales but I know they still hunt toothed whales using traditional kayaks. However, a modern Inuit hunt involves dorys with outboard motors and high-powerd rifles.

There is a case of scrimshaw work (designs etched into the teeth of sperm whales) which I found hard to relate to any living creature. Unlike the Nantucket whaler-men who carved whales and sailing ships, our boys seemed to prefer to illustrate pretty ladies. May-be there was abetter market for them ashore?

Media Summary

Whale-day
by Nicholas Stevenson

How do you measure an Arctic day? Not in hours, minutes and seconds surely? In months and weeks? Or perhaps in the slow, steady rhythm of a whale's heart-beat?

It was late July. The sun had not set since May but we had hardly seen it for a week due to a series of storms that kept us ashore. On this, our last day on the island, it hung red, crackling and fizzing in a shredded sky. The water inside the harbour wall was a mirror, reflecting the sky, the red lighthouse and the old, yellow-painted cod-liver oil factory.

A mink swam out into the shallows and returned with a crab that it ate under the piers of the buildings where the gulls would not steal it from him. Further off, a merganser snorkeled its way across the bay then smashed though it's own reflection and disappeared beneath the water. My watch said it was 1 a.m. It was going to be a whale-day.

My prize for winning a BBC Wildlife story competition was to take part in an Earthwatch expedition of my choice. I chose to watch sperm whales in the Norwegian Arctic, which proved to be quite an adventure; just what I hoped it would be. We were the first six "pathfinder" participants (three Brits and three Americans) on this new project and so we expected there to be a few wrinkles to sort out. The one we encountered was the weather, which is never any-one's fault. We had unusually rough seas most of the time and for two days even the large car-ferries could not sail. Of course this upset our program quite a bit.

The Andenes Fyr.

Andenes is the flat "ness" or point at the north end of the island of Andøya; 300 miles into the Arctic Circle off the top-left corner of Norway. Neither Google Earth or the maps that bought showed detail of the area around our lighthouse, the Andenes Fyr, because it used to be a Cold War naval base. The water is extremely deep very close to the shore, which is why it was a naval base and why it attracts the male sperm whales that come to fatten up and mature on the locally rich pickings of fish and squid.

This was my first Earthwatch trip but the rest of the team were seasoned volunteers. In fact, Warren Stortroan, who is a Minnesotan of Norwegian descent, has been on 77 Earthwatch trips and Ann Schwendener, from Chicago, isn't far behind. I learned a lot from them, especially the fact that the only thing they need is to feel useful and busy, just like my own volunteers at Paxton Pits. They all shunned the idea of just being tourists, especially on the days we could not get out to survey the whales. I, on the other hand, was grateful for time to photograph plants and look for birds.

Our hosts were the MAREFA scientists who come from all over Europe to study whales. They are inspirational young people, as are their international colleagues who work on the tourist boats. They all know their stuff and effortlessly move between speaking Spanish, Italian, English, German and Norwegian. 

Old whale-ship.
No harpoon now, just cameras.

Our job was to assist the scientists by recording whale sightings from two whale-safari boats, the car-ferry and the lighthouse, using a GPS and a Dictaphone. We also took photos to identify the whales we found.

Whale-days might involve 12 hours of swaying and bucking (not to mention chucking) about in boats, over 20 miles from shore. Your eyes get tired first, then your hips and back from the constant motion. Finally your arms and shoulders ache from holding on to things all day. I found the lighthouse to be even more tiring due to its steep ladders and the high winds on top. We collapsed into bed around midnight each day and the fact that it was often brighter at 1 a.m. than 1 p.m. didn't bother me at all: I could sleep for England.

Sperm whale.
Note the bite from a killer whale.

My first sperm whale was a brown, blotchy character called Miø. We found him over 30 km from shore over a deep gully in the ocean floor. He waved us goodbye with his tail at around 10.30 pm and stayed down for one hour and ten minutes, coming up in almost the same spot to charge his blood with oxygen before expelling all the air from his body and diving again. He might have gone down 2 km under our boat. The pace of whale watching is other-worldly; it was after 1 a.m. when we reached port that day.

Our home at the foot of the lighthouse was an ideal spot from which to explore the Arctic flora and fauna and you might think that, with 24 hours of daylight a day, we would have plenty of time for walking. On whale-days we were kept very busy and on other days the weather was almost too foul to stagger outside without being roped together. All the same, my plant and bird lists grew each day and I had some surprises.

I knew most of the plants from Scotland, where they are considered to be alpines, but at the crest of the beach I met a most peculiar and spectacular assortment of flowers, all existing near the northern edge of their range. It was the same with the land-birds. Old friends like house sparrows and magpies co-existed with bluethroats, redwings, twites and fieldfares.

Arctic Tern

One evening I gave a talk for the whale-guides and volunteers about the seabirds to be seen from the boats. For all of us, the seabirds, especially the puffins, gave our whale-safaris added value, but it was the whales that we wanted to see. Sperm whales are particularly fascinating because of their complex social life and the fact that they navigate in the dark using echo-location. By our last day we had all seen a dead one and most of us had seen at least one live whale. 

On our last morning-shift we found two new sperm whales to add to the catalogue and then we went out again in the afternoon to find more. Instead we spotted a humpback whale that stayed on the surface for only minutes at a time, and a pod of four killer whales that we followed for over an hour. By the end of the afternoon we were surrounded by over 20 killer whales that came very close to the boat. I will never forget that afternoon.

I would like to thank my Earthwatch colleges for being such brilliant company and the MAREFA project staff for being such attentive hosts.

You can read more about my week in  Norway at www.whale-spot.blogspot.com 

Jim Stevenson, Paxton Pits Nature Reserve, England.

And there were whales.

Flukes up.

No picture of a sperm whale can convey the living creature, but we certainly had fun trying. Most of the photos we took were for identification purposes so we needed to have as much of the surfaced whale in view as possible. We especially wanted the dorsal fin from both sides and the tail-flukes from top and bottom. In a normal dive a feeding sperm whale is a very obliging creature, but if you spook him he will slip quietly away in a shallow dive, without showing you his flukes.

Who is looking at who?

Killer whales are on the surface for most of the time, actively hunting and socialising so there is a lot of movement in the photos. Even so, I never once saw the eyes or mouth of a whale in Norway, though I'm sure that the orcas looked us over from the corners of their eyes as they surfaced in the manner of large porpoises.

You can see my photos of whales by clicking on "Pure Flukes".

Birds in Andenes

Fulmar

Bird photography is a specialist business, calling for big lenses and endless patience. I'm just an opportunist so my pictures look very amateur, despite getting pretty close to some remarkable birds.

My technique (if you can call it that) is to put my 300 mm lens onto my Nikon and set the camera to sports mode. Then I take as many pictures as I can in the hope that just one of them will be sharp. In good light with a sitting duck you can get good results, but a flying bird, from a boat, in the middle of an Arctic gale, with rain and sea spray all over the place is a bit of a challenge.

You can view some of my photos at "Andenes Birds".

I think my Arctic Tern is probably my best shot. He was trying to kill me at the time, as I walked near his nest on the quayside. We saw hundreds of these archetypal migratory birds every day. Soon they will be on their way to the South Atlantic or even the South Pacific. They must experience more daylight in a year than any other animal on this planet, including ourselves.

Terns and puffins carry food to their young and you can actually see the sand-eels in their mouths as they fly. This makes them attractive to klepto-parasites such as Arctic skuas. I also saw a great skua from the ferry once, but the scarcest and most elegant of these piratical birds is the long-tailed skua. They look like terns when they fly, which must enable them to get pretty close to their prey without being spotted.

Apart from fulmars, we only saw one petrel; a tiny Leach's petrel which was following the whales.

Arctic skua.

Divers or loons nest on the freshwater tarns inland and fly to the coast to feed. I saw red throated and black throated divers in flight, but never on the water. However, the local sea-duck population could be watched inside the harbour. Eiders were the most common ducks but we also saw common and velvet scoters, mergansers and goosanders. Whooper swans nested in the lakes near the airport.

The list of land-birds is short but quite special, with sparrows, redwings and fieldfares to be found around the houses and nearby woods.  Wheatears  and twites were everywhere along the beach crest and any open ground while blue-throats and ring-ouzels were seen higher up. I was surprised to find a colony of sand-martins in a stockpile of sand at a builder's yard.

I think Andenes would make an excellent bird observatory in September and October when birds stream down the coast from the high Arctic. A ringing station for passerines at the base of the lighthouse could be manned every morning while visible migration could be monitored from the lighthouse or the ferry. I suspect that geese and swans pass through in good numbers. Waders could be monitored daily by simply walking the beach.

There is an observatory down at Lista, near Stavanger that pulls in spectacular numbers of birds in Autumn, including a lot of Finnish birds on their way to the UK. Andenes could turn up some real surprises as it is so much further north.

Puffins

Flowers of Andøya

Giant hogweed

In the short time I was there I tried to get to grips with the wildflowers that grew near the Andenes lighthouse and beyond.

The first thing that struck me was the wealth of species to be found there, some of which were old friends from Scotland, the English seaside, lowland grassland and the tops of the Pennines. Many would turn out to be alpines or Arctic versions of the plants I knew. Some were entirely new to me.

It was my quest for arctic birds that first led me to the Botanical Gardens in Tromsø where I fell in love with the semi-wild woodland area that constitutes the geology trail. Beneath the canopy of the dwarf forest where redwings sang, I found dwarf cornel, geraniums, cow wheat and pig-nut. In an opening further up I found a perfect miniature bog with cotton grass, sundew, cloudberry and heather.

Around the houses in Tromsø and in Andenes I was astonished to see masses of giant hogweed. It is an invasive alien that can give you a nasty rash, but the locals are rather proud of it in Tromsø. It was everywhere.

"Fire-weed" in Tromsø

The long daylight hours between May and August and the warming influence of the Atlantic make for a vigorous growing season. The sheer number of flowering plants is staggering and I could see the seed-heads of many more such as primulas, gentians and saxifrages that had already bloomed. Even so, in July there was a whole array of later bloomers such as asters to be found still in bud.

If you are an amateur botanist interested in the arctic flora but not wanting to be a full blown Amundsen, I'd say that you could do no better than go to the Norwegian islands in the Arctic Circle. Tromsø would be my starting point and I would also like to try the Lofoton Islands.

If you have never seen this kind of flora before, the nearest thing we have in the UK is the machair of the Outer Hebrides, particularly on the Uists, Coll and Tyree.

Dwarf cornel.

You can see my slideshow at "Andenes Flora"

Monochrome

I take quite a few black-and-white pictures because I think they stand out from the crowd. Mostly I use monochrome for indoor shots when there is not enough light for colour and I don't want to use a flash. Sometimes I simply make a mistake and forget to reset my camera to colour.

Of course you can make any colour photo into a monochrome, using a computer or the onboard menu on your camera, but these were taken as black and whites; there's no turning back.

Enjoy the slideshow, "Monochrome".

People pictures

I never take enough people-pictures. If you have any more shots of the team, please send them in to me.

All the same, I have made a slide show of the pictures that I have. Why are there so many pictures of Richard?

You can view the show at Photobucket.

Landscapes

Andenes Fyr, taken by Laura from a boat.

The scenery at Andenes was always spectacular and the view changed with the weather. I have posted an album of scenes at Photobucket that you can open by clicking the link Scenery

This album contains pictures of boats and buildings as well as scenery, but whales, flowers, people and birds will all get separate albums. Most of the photos are mine, but some of the best ones are from Laura. I will add more photos to these albums as I edit my files.

The default view is as a slideshow, but you can get to the album from there and download pictures to keep.

If you have trouble opening or viewing the album, or want to add some of your own photos to mine, or want to correct or comment on anything I have posted, please email me.

Home trip

Beach-combings.

After all our bags were packed, I took one last look around the kitchen. On our arrival it had been a spartan place with empty cupboards and no personal nick-nacks. By the end of the week we had cluttered up the fridge with salami and treats and we had personalised the window-sill with flotsam and jetsam from the storms of the week.

After a final group photo, we were driven by Iva to the local airport. The whole team of six Earthwatch volunteers caught the same flight out of Andenes to Tromsø, so we all got to experience one more adventure together.

Group Photo.

The airport terminal is tiny and the formalities are over in minutes. The field is shared with the military, so you cannot take photos, but the advantage is that there is an excellent, very long runway. The plane is swiftly loaded and you taxi out to the strip: so far, so good.

The plane was light as there was only ten or so passengers. We were on full power with our two propellers clawing hungrily at the moist air and I could feel the nose lifting after only a few hundred yards, then the nose bit down hard and the brakes screamed and bumped as we came to an emergency stop.

Safe arrival in Tromsø.

No one was at all alarmed as it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with the plane. We guessed that a hazard had appeared on the runway and I hoped is was my elusive reindeer, but it was birds. A large flock of gulls and waders had chosen that moment to fly across the peninsular. The swift action of the pilot had saved the life of at least one gull, and possibly all of us. My pals shook their fists at me as I was the bird-man on the trip.

"Your birds are a total nuisance, Jim."


I lost touch with the others as soon as we arrived in Tromsø. Richard and Eleanor stayed in transit for a flight to Heathrow, Ann was bound for Berlin while Warren and Laura were heading into town to explore before their night-flight. I was stuck alone in the arrivals lounge waiting to check in for a direct flight to Gatwick. Still, with free Wi-Fi, I had time to send you this.

My flight home to Gatwick was direct without a stop in Oslo. True to form we took off into the Great Norwegian Cloud and that was the last I saw of Norway for a whole hour. I took a short nap and then started on a new chapter of the book I had carried with me all week, unopened.

If you have ever pursued whales and wanted to get to grips with them from both an artistic and a scientific view (the living whale and what it means) the book for you is "Leviathan" by Philip Hoare. Beware though: the alternative title is "The Whale" and it has a different cover, but it is the same book.

The set book on "Sperm Whales" for this expedition is by Hal Whitehead. It is a brilliant introduction to the subject by a scientist who can write. "Leviathan" is by a writer who can do science. It is a really good read, like the award winning "Cod" by Mark Kurlansky, taking in every aspect of the whale without ever becoming a dull catalogue of facts. Did you know, for instance, that Starbuck's coffee chain is named after the first mate on the Pequod? Or that Moby (the pop musician, Richard Melville Hall) is a direct descendant of Herman Melville who wrote "Moby Dick"? Or that Captain Hook is based on Capt. Ahab, and the crocodile replaces the whale in "Peter Pan"?

In truth the shadow of Moby Dick hangs heavily over Philip Hoare, and over all of us who seek the whale. I am tempted to have a second try at reading the original now.

One of our team, who had never seen any whale before this trip, candidly remarked that her first sighting of a sperm whale wasn't what she expected. None of us knew what to say. On reading "Leviathan", I can see what she meant. Our vision of the whale is based on art and literature from a time when the only view of a whole whale to be had was from strandings or from the descriptions from the whaling men themselves. From our world, suspended in the interface between ocean and atmosphere, with maybe 2 km of water under our keel, all we can see of a sperm whale is the top of it's head and part of it's back. This animal is helpless on the surface because it needs to charge its blood with oxygen for maybe fifteen minutes before exhaling all the air from its body and descending to the invisible depths where we cannot follow, for over an hour. So, although we can claim to have seen a sperm whale, we have only seen a glimpse of part of it.

The dead whale that we saw had sunk into the beach so that we could only see the top of it's head and it's back, so it looked like it was swimming in sand. It could not tell us anything more than we had seen from the boats.

One day we will be able to attach a camera to the whale, that works at pressure 2 km under the sea in the darkness and transmits its images back to us. Then we will have a more rounded, 3D image of the sperm whale. For now we may be awed, but at the same time frustrated.

The paradox of the sperm whale is that it is unknowable, but we ache to know it's secrets. That's the attraction.

Norway is a bit like a whale: After losing sight of it for an hour I caught a brief, final glimpse of prosperous marinas and fertile valleys around Stavanger or maybe Kristiansand, before heading out across a cloudless North Sea to Essex, the Thames estuary, Kent and East Sussex.

To my whale-watch pals I have to say that I'm so sorry to have missed the chance for a proper good-bye, but I think we all got along really well and it was a real honour to have met you all.

Bon Voyage!

Jim

Killers

"Reine"

Our last day on Andøya was to be our best, which is the way we would want it, given the choice. It was the only really calm day of the week and the air veritably stank of whales, at least to me it did.

The plan was to maximise our observation effort using the tower, the ferry, the fast catamaran "Dolphin" and the slow-but-sure ex-whaleboat "Reine". Both the deep sea "Canyon" and the shallower "Fjord" were covered, but the boats had the most success in the canyon.

"Dolphin"

"Reine" acted as our spotter and stayed out whale-seeking all day while "Dolphin" made two trips with about 80 tourists at a time. I was lucky enough to be on "Dolphin" both times as we came alongside "Reine" to see the whale or whales that she had found.  This meant that our whole team got to encounter two new sperm-whales that had not been catalogued before.  They were both young males, grey coloured with no obvious markings, but as we saw them "flukes-up" one of them had already had a small bite taken from his tail.

On our second trip of the day we approached what we thought was to be one of the two whales from the morning, but it was a humpback. It didn't stay on the surface long and moved at some speed in a series of shallow dives. I don't think we got any pictures of it before the skipper spotted a pod of smaller whales that, at long range, he mistakenly took to be pilot whales. (At that point us whale-spotters  couldn't see anything at all.) We slowly edged up to them and saw that the unit consisted of a calf protected by two females and a patrolling male arcing around them at a distance of about 500 m. This was the first sighting of killer whales for some weeks, and it got better.

Young sperm whale.
Note the bite on the left side.

The female orcas were not bothered by the boat. and they swam by us for a long time. The male showed some displeasure by beating his tail on the surface and he kept his distance at first, but soon he settled down. We slowly became aware that other orcas were joining our pod until we estimated over 20 individuals were visible at once.

We enjoyed an hour with the killer whales and found ourselves over 22 Km away from the lighthouse. We then turned for home, hoping to pick up another whale on the way back or in the Fjord but the weather was turning against us  with rain showers, poor visibility and a rising wind.

Male killer whale.

Another male.

To be honest, even with the reward of a lifetime experience like this, five or six hours of constant vigilance is enough for me. We are supposed to take 20 minute watches but I can't switch off when I am relieved in case I miss something. I had every confidence that the crew or my colleagues would spot any whales that came a long, but the birds were another matter.

I think I made two interesting discoveries that day:

I had previously noticed that fulmars and gulls tracked the "Reine" and that when she stopped to listen for whales on the hydrophones more birds would move in to form a flotilla on the water. They obviously associated the ship with food, especially when it stopped moving. "Reine" is a traditional whaling boat and looks like a fishing vessel, so I assume that the birds think we have stopped to haul nets. My new observation was that they don't do this with Dolphin because she is too fast and does not behave or look anything like a fishing boat. Birds did not show much interest in the car-ferry either.

Females with a calf.

When we saw a sperm whale on the surface, it did not seem to have any birds associated with it, but the killer whales certainly did. I assume that hanging about for an hour waiting for a sperm whale to surface is not very productive for the birds, especially since the whale does not feed anywhere near the surface and any food scraps that emerge from the rear end of the whale tend to be indigestible keratinous beaks from squids that sink quickly.

"Killers" feed actively on the surface and produce quite a lot of tit-bits for the birds. This shows that long-lived seabirds like fulmars are very observant and can differentiate between different types of boats and of whales.

Around the killer whale-pods we saw a lot of fulmars, puffins and gulls and these birds were pestered by quite a lot of Arctic skuas. We did not see any shearwaters but Eleanor asked me about the tiny, swallow like bird that was flitting around below us which we identified as a Leach's petrel, which is a very small member of the shearwater tribe.

Seven Sisters

Ann above Bleik and Puffin Island 

It was to be our last day in Ardenes. At 2 am on Friday morning the sun was a golden orb above the light-house. For the first time in a week the harbour was like a mirror, reflecting the sun, the buildings and the harbour wall. It looked like a whale-day was coming our way.

I was out early to use the sunlight, mainly looking at the zonation of flowers along the beach. The salt-zone is very narrow with mainly pink purslane growing there, but only a meter away there are sand dune and alpine species growing in profusion. I found orchids, cloudberry, alpine bistort and mountain avens, for example.

I'm still trying to name this,
but I think it is Alpine sow-thistle. 

By breakfast it was becoming a bit more cloudy, but still, it was warm and calm. We were all booked to go on whale-boats in the late morning, but Ann and I had time to walk up to the Met. Station on the mountain for an hour while some of the others went up the lighthouse or on the ferry.

The mountain summit gave us panoramic views over Andenes and over Bleik but it was the dwarf forest at the bottom of the hill that intrigued me most. We even heard birdsong there as a redwing gently murmured from a birch tree. Two young redstarts hopped ahead of us and willow warblers flitted silently (and appropriately) through the willows.

Spotted orchid

(On Saturday's flight home, I started to nod off and replayed the final day in my head. The baby redstarts were not quite right: the tail was red but only near the rump. They looked more like baby robins than anything else, but there was that tail. What else has a red tail and looks like a robin? Bluethroat of course. I had seen two bluethroats without realising it!! These are fantastic birds that every birder wants to see and every artist wants to paint. I didn't even take a photo.)

Alpine lady's mantle and dwarf cornel.

My favourite zone is where the trees run into the moor; the top of the tree line. I think that's because I always associate it with my childhood in the Yorkshire Dales. This is where you find wheatears and ring ouzels. We saw both on the mountain and I assume this would be the place to find woodcocks and hazel-hens. What I most dearly wanted to see was reindeer of a moose. They would be hidden in the trees, but I might just glimpse one on the top edge where the trees were tiny and the grazing was good.



The woods were full of alpine plants and so was the hillside. I could have stayed all day, but this was to be a whale-day. In fact, it was to be the whale-day to end all whale-days.

Puffins

The rough weather continued on Thursday and even the ferries were cancelled. Ironically the big car ferry could go anywhere in the roughest of seas but high cross-winds made precise manoeuvring impossible in the harbours. We had witnessed a some tense moments in the wheel-house after several attempts to line up the ramp for the cars to exit. It is a highly skilled job and the penalties are high for a mistake.

So, for a treat we all made a visit to Puffin Island which lies in a relatively sheltered cove beyond the Seven Sisters, off the village of Bleik. From the shore the island looks like a huge, conical whale-tooth rising almost perpendicularly from the sea. My guess is that it is the stump of a volcanic plug.

The Laura

Our boat was a beautiful, traditional tub of a vessel called "Laura".  It bounced and swayed it's way out of the harbour and inched along the edge of the mole (harbour-arm) in a well marked channel between treacherous rocks . Some passengers were moved to the stern to prevent the bow from nose-diving into the swell. If that happened a lot of expensive cameras would have been drenched with salt water.

We had been seeing bee-like swarms (rather than flocks) of puffins off the lighthouse every day. They often flew surprisingly high in the air and we even found them over 30 km out among the whales. All of them originated from this one Puffin Island, Bleiksøya. Even so, the sheer number of birds sitting in the water and milling round the island was a revelation. So many birds!

Razorbill.

I had trouble focusing on any one puffin; they were all so cute, but by placing myself low down and only looking at the birds closest to the boat I managed to get a few pictures. (As a matter of fact I took over 500 photos!)

Dotted among the puffins we found a few razorbills, black guillemots and shags but this was really "puffin central". I suppose the reason for this was the shape of the island. It had only a few really precipitous cliffs for ledge-nesting seabirds to lay their eggs but it had a thin covering of soil and vegetation where puffins could dig their burrows. All the same, I would have expected a few more of the bigger auks and perhaps some kittiwakes and fulmars? Please?

"I can't see any puffins."

The reason for their absence was soon obvious. At least 6 white-tailed eagles were methodically working the island over in shifts. They even had a rest area on the end of the island where they could take a break from eating puffins. The skipper explained that kittiwakes had attempted to nest on Bleiksøya but the eagles had driven them off to nest on the houses in Andenes.

Two methods were used by eagles to catch puffins: We saw the "grab and snatch" method, which just meant flying around the island to intercept a puffin that was getting airborne from the slopes. The eagles would drop their undercarriage and put down their flaps, grab a puffin with one talon and make a landing. The result was a mini snow-shower of black and white feathers. The other method was "loitering with intent". The eagle would just follow a puffin home and then stand by his front door until he came out. The last thing that the unfortunate tenant would see was the inside of that huge, cruel yellow beak.

Eagle chasing a puffin

The young puffins were still in their burrows so the loss of an adult would also mean the death of the single chick. It takes both parents to rear the sooty-coloured fluff-balls until they can jump down to the water, which they do even before they can fly. The main food they eat is sand-eels that the adults bring in, several at a time, draped in their bills like a silvery moustache. As the folks come home with the shopping they are mugged by a bunch of thug-birds that chase them, scream at them and even beat them up until they drop the goods. It's a bad neighbourhood.

Iva and Richard.

Large gulls will have a go at mugging and some even behave like eagles, snatching whole birds at the entrance to their burrows, but the experts are the skuas. We saw dozens of Arctic skuas (Parasitic jaegers) attacking the puffins. They behaved like falcons, approaching in steady, level flight and then accelerating into a high speed chase that was over in seconds.

The "Laura" proved to be an ideal vessel for it's job and the skipper did a fine job of pointing out all the birds to us, in at least three languages. My only objection was when he used the ship's horn to frighten an eagle away from a burrow. He said that this was to save a puffin's life and that of it's chick, but my ideal is that we should slip in quietly as observers in order to witness as natural a spectacle as possible, then leave with the minimum of fuss. Tooting the horn may also have scared shags and razorbills from their nests so that gulls could steal the eggs.

Returning to Bleik.

I supposed the eagles would have chicks to feed too, possibly in an eyrie on the island, but was told that most of them were immature birds and that the adult pair nested miles away on the big island of Andøya. I am sure he was right as I saw one fly across from the sheer cliffs at the back of the bay, above Bleik.

I mentioned my sighting of a rare Long-taiked skua the day before and the skipper told me with confidence "We don't get those here."

"You do now", I said to myself.