Great Sperm Whales, mum, calf and another plus Common Bottlenose Dolphin. Next pages: Great Sperm Whale (Mike Watson).
to themselves and call in on our return south. What a good call that was by Captain Art! As we passed Isla las Animas the spotters up top picked up a pod of sperm whales on the horizon, their peculiar off-centred nostrils on the left side of their heads cause them to give a characteristic, roughly 45 degree angled blow, which, in calm weather is obvious even from a great distance. We gradually closed in on them and realised that we were in the middle of a large pod of at least 22 animals of all ages from small calf to the mums themselves. We even saw a group of three youngsters swimming together for a while before a couple of mums turned up from the depths. This is obviously fairly close to where these animals give birth and we were very privileged to be able to enjoy this protracted encounter. Great Sperm Whales usually appear as a log-like object on the water’s surface, until they start rocking back and forth, make a couple of false dives and then the real thing, tail flukes and all, as they head for the depths. We were fortunate to see this countless times, as well as some detail of their bulbous heads and wrinkled backs.
Great Sperm Whale is the largest toothed predator on the planet, with bulls measuring up to 20 metres long. The bull which sank the whaling ship, the Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket, Massachusetts in 1820 was the inspiration for the novel ‘Moby Dick’ and was claimed to be 26 metres long! Bulls do not have anything to do with raising young, this role belongs solely to the cows and they are smaller at up to 11 metres long. Cows are sometimes half the length of bulls and a third of their weight but they still weigh up to 15 tons and are very impressive creatures nevertheless. They exhibit the largest difference in size between the sexes, as well as having the largest head and tail flukes in proportion to the size of any cetacean. More than one million sperm whales were killed by the whaling industry between 1800 and 1985 when it was given full protection and even Japan stopped hunting them in 1988. However, with such a low rate of birth and a long period of maturity it will take time for their numbers to recover to former levels, thought to be around 1,100,000. These waters also produced our best Least
22 BirdQuest/Wild Images Tour Report: Baja California: The Last Kingdom of the Whales 2018 www.birdquest-tours.com