Song of the Whale Diary 28th September - 4th October

Sunday 28th September
Written by Vassili
We are at sea and searching for beaked whales.  Joining the boat for a couple of weeks in the middle of the field season with everything set up and working, it is hard for me to imagine the hard work that has gone into designing the research programme, building the equipment and keeping the boat running. Beaked whales are not easy to study. In the same way that the early whalers focused their lethal attentions on the more coastal and slow moving species, so too the whale researchers. Humpbacks were amongst the first animals to be studied.  Easy to photograph, collections of tail flukes were quickly built up, revealing much about the life histories of these magnificent animals.  Thirty years ago, the first Southern right whale photographs were taken: instead, here it was the callosities on their head that provided their individual identification marks. The Song of the Whale team has always had a strong emphasis on acoustics, and in the late 1980s, with an earlier boat, they began to study sperm whales.  Oceanic animals but slow-moving and with one key quality: they make the loudest sounds in the animal kingdom.  Even a primitive hydrophone can pick up the clicks of a sperm whale.

Getting data on beaked whales will not be straightforward – El Hierro provides ideal conditions: close to land we can enlist the help of a shore station to look for whales and the island itself to provide a calm lee.  But today at sea we have problems finding the animals. Their high-frequency clicks are intermittent at the best of times for they are quite directional. Our computer confirms only a few detections. With such a little-known group of animals and some pressing conservation problems to address, it seems clear that it will take many years of patient efforts to begin to address the key questions.  How widespread is their distribution?  Will it ever be possible to provide advice to the navies of the world to reduce lethal encounters with military sonar?  And the purely ecological questions about this group, surely the most unusual mammals in the ocean.

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Monday 29th September
Written by Richard
We spent last night at anchor off the W. Coast of El Hierro, this was to allow the BBC to beam their latest reports back to London from the beach.  This turned out to be a bit of an adventure as the beach landing had to be made through the surf and once on dry land having set up their equipment Richard and John were a bit unnerved by the sound of minor landslides on the cliff behind them. This morning we haul up the anchor at 8am and head back around to the South of the island.  The shore team are already on station as we round the light house and are soon directing us to a group of Blainville's beaked whales.  While we drift waiting for the whales to surface we start to get good detections on the hydrophone. The whales then surface within 100m of us, perfect for both photo ID and for the BBC to get some good video images. The photo ID data will be given to Natacha and her team from ULL who curate a catalogue of locally identified individuals. Throughout the rest of the day we continue to have very good acoustic and visual encounters, returning to harbour late in the evening exhausted by an exceptional day which provided the BBC team with plenty more material to send back to London tonight.

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Tuesday 30th September
Written by Mat
The BBC crew leave us early in the morning and head up to the land station with Jeppe and Nienke.  As we leave harbour the wind begins to build; we unroll the stay sail and then the genoa and sail down to the field area at a steady five knots. We then enter the lee of the land, where we put the sails away and engine on, and wait for a sighting from land to focus our efforts.  The sightings are slow in coming with only a small number of dolphins. The wind starts to wrap around the island in the early afternoon making it almost impossible to sight the animals and the decision is made to head back to harbour where the BBC crew are perched on the dock side, waiting to record our return. The rest of the afternoon is used for catching up on maintenance on Song of the Whale and as evening falls some of the team and BBC head into the hills for some rest and recuperation. We are also joined by Henrique, another SECAC representative for a few days.

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Wednesday 1st October
Written by Vassili
I awake to hear the sound of the engine being started, as Song of the Whale lies alongside the quay. It is still dark but Richard (our skipper) is keen to get going to make the most of the day ahead.  He was right to sail early and as the day progresses, the weather gets steadily rougher.  Today there seems to be no lee shelter behind the island.  Wherever we go it is rough. After some time with Blainville’s beaked whales we have to head back to the harbour.  Immediately we arrive, the BBC team head for shore to beam up the footage and radio material that they have recorded during the day. John sits on the quay in the dark, bathed in an eerie light from his laptop computer. A few hours later, at 1am we slip our lines and head out back to sea.

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Thursday 2nd October
We were all rather tired this morning after our late night, but the weather in the morning is excellent and we soon settle back into our routine. The shore station spots some Cuvier’s beaked whales and soon we are in the area sailing back and forth trying to make some recordings. This is our best opportunity this week to get recordings of Cuvier’s - all of our other recordings this week have been Blainville's. After several hours of transects, we have still not seen the animals from the boat, but soon Olly spots them swimming past our stern. They appear very white, from scarring on the heads, and so are relatively easy to see, and once they have been spotted we keep seeing them – the largest number of animals we see together is 7 – quite a large group. We have some good opportunities for photo ID and also get some good recordings.

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Friday 3rd October
Change over day today - Richard, Vassilli, Antonella and Henrique are leaving us, and Magnus re-joins, with some other crew members coming back in the next few days. We also use the day for shopping and cleaning and all those other small jobs.

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Saturday 4th October
Richard and John from the BBC are also leaving us today, and Jeppe drives them to the airport early in the morning. It was really good of them to come and spend some time with us, so thanks very much to them. Shortly after they leave, we head out to sea, although there are only 5 of us today whilst we wait for everyone else to arrive. Also, Natacha and Mark's group have returned and they are setting up their landstation, so we have Nienke back on the boat now. The weather is not co-operating – there are many white caps and some quite big swell. We have no sightings from the boat today, and as the weather deteriorates, we head back in around 1700.