Whales Are Wild Life Too..

Tools · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2009 10:07 pm Post subject: Whales Are Wild Life Too..

These shots are sprinkled around in other posts, but I thought they deserved their own Wildlife spread.

These were all taken of the coast of Lahaina, Maui, where the Pacific Humpback Whale comes every winter to pretty much play around and mate. The area is a protected National Habitat and an important area that has contributed to an enormous come-back of the Humpback Whale. At the time we were there, an aerial survey estimated about 650 around the Islands.

You can spot them blowing from several miles away, and if you're lucky you can get there before they sound (dive). I have a number of blow shots, but here there were three adults all together, although this is a shot of only one (drawback of a long lens). The air was misty with their spray:

The same three as we watched them for about 15 minutes; the third one is barely in the frame to the left. Occasionally one of them went under. When you see the tail fin come out and they dive, they're gone for several minutes... We timed about 8 minutes each time one sounded.

Here is another adult sounding. We waited around but never did see this one come back up in the area, but in 8 minutes they can be very far away:

A large one very close by:

We spent quite a while watching a female with her calf.

Here is the calf standing on end.. It never went completely under for more than a few seconds and stayed pretty much with it's mom: I have a lot of flipper and splash shots of the ~1200 pound calf. Probably only a couple of months old while mom may have gone 30 tons or more..

Whale watching is fascinating. Several of them breached in the area (jumped completely out of the water) and when they came crashing down it sounds like a gunshot. You have to be pretty lucky to get a shot of that and I was not that lucky.

This is not my photo, but gives you an idea of their looks and size. If you go back to my mom and calf photo, you can see that the calf is riding on the front portion of it's mothers body.

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Letsgodiving · Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2009 2:09 am Post subject:

It's an awe inspiring experience to see such creatures in their natural habitat. Nice shots.

uncle aj · Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2009 2:32 am Post subject:

What a great experience it must have been.

They say there's a story in every picture, well there's a few tails in these.

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