WHY DO THEY do it? Why does an animal weighing perhaps 35 tonnes spend such energy propelling itself clear of the sea, twisting long, knobbly pectoral fins in the air to land on its back in a great gout of spray? It's the most forceful, spectacular action known among mammals, shared even with blue whales, the biggest mammals in the world, writes MICHAEL VINEY
It’s to shake off parasites, say some – all those little whale lice chewing in the folds of its skin. Or to strip off a harmless but often heavy load of barnacles (on one humpback’s head they weighed 1,000lb or 454kg). Or to slough off dead skin. Or to stun a shoal of herring. Or to scare competitive dolphins. Or for exercise or play. Or just a jubilant announcement: “I’m here!” Whatever the reason – and no one is quite sure – the humpback whale that breached again and again in clear view of the crowds on Hook Head, Co Wexford, last weekend was offering the biggest thrill in whale-watching and one far more familiar in images from Maine or Newfoundland.
For Padraig Whooley, who took these pictures, it was an ultimate celebration for the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG), whose 20 years of searching, study and public promotion have opened up a whole new chapter in Ireland’s natural history. First came the clifftop, telescope sightings of fin whales, feeding on sprat in autumn off the Old Head of Kinsale. Then, soon after 2000, the first seaborne encounters with humpbacks off Galley Head. And in September 2008, the first Irish photographs of blue whales, hunting along the slopes of the Porcupine Bank.
Not since a century ago, when Norwegian whalers began to deploy their fast steamers, with harpoon-guns in the bows, from bases at the Mullet peninsula in Co Mayo, has so much been known about whales around Ireland. Nor can there have there been quite so many alive since all Atlantic whaling ceased, under pressure, in 1986. At that time, perhaps 25,000 humpbacks survived, between at least 10 populations in both hemispheres – fewer than one-fifth of their original number. For the blues and the right whales (“right” because they swam slowly, came farther in, and stayed afloat when dead), the survivors were down to 4 or 5 per cent.
Ireland's early 20th-century Norwegian whalers, steaming out farther and farther – even to the Rockall Bank – in search of quarry killed only half a dozen humpbacks, less than 1 per cent of a catch dominated by fin whales, sperms and blues. And even today, the biggest summer feeding assembly of humpbacks is found in the western Atlantic, migrating between the Caribbean and Labrador (their Latin name, Megaptera novaeangliae, means "long-winged New Englander"). The species may always have been relatively scarce around Ireland, despite the thought that the lovely slow Irish air of the Blaskets, Port na bPúcaí, was borrowed from a lovelorn male humpback singing beneath a currach.
The IWDG thinks that a small but distinct population of humpbacks migrates to Ireland and farther north from breeding grounds around the Cape Verde Islands off north-west Africa. Indeed, the group’s first research trip to the islands, in 2003, gave Dr Simon Berrow, its founder and co-ordinator, his first close-up pictures of the whale’s spectacular breaching.
The Hook Head whale was thought to be feeding on fish at one of Ireland’s big spawning grounds for herring. Here, under licence from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Berrow used a crossbow with a special, retrievable arrow tip to take a small sample of the humpback’s blubber – a biopsy for genetic analysis, and confirmation of its sex (probably male). Photographs of its fluke-pattern showed it to be new to the coast and thus the eleventh humpback met there so far.
Several of the animals have come back annually (Galley Head seems to be a favourite feeding ground) but none of the tail fluke images has found matches in the North Atlantic database of more than 5,000 humpbacks kept at the College of the Atlantic at Bar Harbour, Maine. Each animal’s tail is distinctive, made so not only by the permanent scars and notches left by the teeth of attacking killer whales, but the variable patterning of black and white on the underside of the flukes (a humpback with an unusual, all-black tail appears in the ID catalogue at the IWDG website, www.iwdg.ie.)
It's the males that sing, hanging head down, in long, complex sequences that, filtered through water and the recording process, seem to resonate so movingly in the human ear. Close up, wrote Roger Payne in his fine book Among Whales(1995), "the song is so loud, so thundering in your chest and head, you feel as if someone is pressing you to a wall with their open palms, shaking you until your teeth rattle. When you swim close enough to touch the singer you doubt whether you will be able to stand the intensity of sound." In the same book, Payne – then the world's leading cetacean biologist – wrote about Jon Lien, a scientist in Newfoundland who last summer was inducted into the Order of Canada, his nation's highest honour. It recognised his pioneering work in whale research at the Memorial University of St John's. For Newfoundland's fishermen, it was due recognition for the man who had disentangled more than a thousand humpback whales from their nets without unduly damaging them, or harming the animals.
Payne’s narrative is concerned to show the extraordinary gentleness and patience of the whales when Lien arrived in his rubber dinghy to unwind the meshes cutting into them – even when this meant, daringly, pushing his hand into a humpback’s blowhole, with its mighty rim of muscle. The capacities of the IWDG – already practised in rescuing (small) whales stranding alive on Ireland’s beaches – may find new challenges ahead.
Ireland's Ocean: A natural history,by Michael Viney and Ethna Viney, is published by The Collins Press, Cork
EYE ON NATURE
On January 10th I saw a magpie descend on, and kill, a meadow pipit, then flew off holding the dead bird in its beak. I thought magpies preyed only on nestlings.
Dick Collins, Balrath, Co Meath
Magpies will kill and eat small birds, especially when their other sources of food, such as insects, larvae etc, are unobtainable.
During the cold weather a snipe came to my suburban garden. He foraged around until he found the soft ground near the boiler house, but did not seem interested in the hanging nut feeders.
Tom Greene, Mullingar
Snipe came to gardens all over the country when their usual foraging grounds were frozen. They find feeding at nut feeders very difficult. During the cold spell we had two woodcocks living in the garden for three days. Long beaks were perfect for the frosty grass. They left when the weather picked up.
On the family farm for Christmas I heard the sound of the curlew for the first time in 20 years. There was a flock of 15-20 hanging out in one of the fields. I love their call, it is pure wilderness.
Pete Mullineaux, Roscahill, Co Galway
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address.
