On November 19th, Annie Bartlett was in a small plane tracing a low path just 300 metres (1,000ft) above the waters off Cape Cod, her eyes fixed on the expanse beneath.
A scientist with the Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts, Bartlett shared the cabin with a fellow researcher who was also peering downwards in search of whales.
They were on the inaugural survey flight of the 2025-2026 season, and the routine was methodical: the plane took an east-west course, flying back and forth along track lines like a metronome, only veering off if something in the water caught their attention.
It was, by all accounts, a perfect day for whale-spotting: clear light and flat seas. Bartlett noted numerous humpbacks.
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While she recorded each one, what she was looking for was something much rarer: the Right whale, a creature so scarce – there are only an estimated 384 left – that looking for them in the ocean is a bit like searching for a missing punctuation mark in a thousand-page book.
Despite their enormous size, Right whales are elusive. Their bodies are dark; they lack a dorsal fin that breaks the surface in other species; and they tend to linger below the waterline, unseen, surfacing quietly to feed.
But Right whales have one signature feature: their two blowholes are set wide apart, producing a distinctive v-shaped plume when they come up to breathe.
From her side of the plane, Bartlett caught sight of some v-shaped blows in the water, and the pilots immediately broke off their track line and circled to get a closer look.
Cheering broke out in the cabin when they realised what they had observed: the season’s first Right whale. Below, a lone animal was skim-feeding, its mouth wide open, filtering tiny shrimp-like copepods through its baleen plates. For an hour, the team photographed the whale.
Members of the Right Whale Ecology Programme are familiar with roughly 80 per cent of the individuals in the sea and can often identify them from the air. But this whale was different. Its unique scarring marked it out, and the team couldn’t immediately match it to their catalogue.
The following day, Bartlett and her colleague sent the photographs to researchers at the New England Aquarium, a conservation and research institute in Boston, who were similarly puzzled – until one of them recalled a Right whale that had been seen off the Irish coast in July 2024.
A holidaymaker from Co Tyrone had been out fishing for mackerel in McSwynes Bay, Co Donegal, when he spotted a dark outline of a whale. It turned out to be a Right whale – the first sighting off Ireland in 114 years. The Irish Whale and Dolphin group had sent photographs to the New England Aquarium to alert them.
Right whales were named by commercial whalers who thought they were the ‘right’ whales to hunt. Slow swimmers who hang around near coasts in shallow waters. Right whales’ blubber is packed with oil, which was historically used for soaps, industrial lubricants and lighting lamps. Their baleen plates were turned into corsets, brushes and umbrellas. Unlike other whales, Right whales float when they are killed, making them easy to harvest.
In 1736, Right whales were “found abundantly” off Donegal and Sligo, but a year later Ireland’s first commercial whaling operation began. Fishermen struck the whales with hand harpoons, finishing them with lances. By 1910, these whales had been driven out, locally eradicated after centuries of relentless killing.
According to Bartlett, Right whales were virtually extinct in the eastern North Atlantic, making the sighting off Donegal an almost unbelievable occurrence – particularly because it was an individual previously unknown to scientists. When the New England Aquarium confirmed the whale she had seen off Cape Cod was the same one spotted near Donegal, Bartlett was amazed.
[ Specimen of rare whale spotted off Donegal last year sighted almost 5,000km away near Boston ]
From just two sightings 5,000km apart – one off Donegal, the other off the coast of North America – what can be said about this lone whale?
Bartlett ventures a guess: it’s likely a juvenile, under nine years old, of unknown sex. Why it was skim-feeding on copepods in November is a bit of a mystery; Right whales would not be expected to do that so early in the season. Copepods follow shifting currents, perhaps hinting that changing oceanic conditions might be altering the whale’s movements.
Right whales are under constant pressure from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Earlier this year, the Canadian government introduced protective measures to slow vessels and reduce the risk of collisions with whales.
There is also a move by some United States fisheries towards ropeless gear – instead of attaching lobster and crab traps to ropes connected vertically to the surface, which easily snares a passing whale, the traps sit on the ocean floor without ropes, but with a buoy attached, which can be triggered remotely by fishers on boats above.
Bartlett says the whale has been given a temporary identification code of CT01IRE24, though for now it’s being called the “Irish Whale”.
This sighting is the first time a Right whale has been seen first in European waters and then in the western Atlantic – a small but encouraging sign that these waters might still hold value to these exceptionally rare, magnificent creatures. Their return is more than welcome.
