Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Whales!

(Dusts off blog...) Whoops, haven't been updating this as often as I'd like... Eh, it's summer, between ridiculous heat waves and sporadic vacations I guess things get a little slip-shod. And I have a whole pile of stuff to scan and post, time to catch up.

Speaking of vacations, I've recently recovered from a frenetic mini-vacation in the general area of Boston and the New England coast. We covered Boston, Cape Cod, Plum Island, Rhode Island and Vermont in the space of a week, it was slightly insane. AAAAND... we saw whales! Humpbacks! Jumping! I've never seen humpbacks before, and I've never ever seen whales actually breaching before, and this guy was doing breaches and half-breaches and tail slaps and fin-waggling and everything! It was amazing. Of course it was on a lurching boat in a near-storm with spray all over the place, so I wasn't able to take any pictures on the spot, but I scraped together a bunch of sketches from memory to reconstruct the event. Here you go!

humpback whale breaching


humpback whale breachinghumpback whale breaching


humpback whale breachinghumpback whale breaching


humpback whale breaching


humpback whale fluke slappinghumpback whale fluke slapping


humpback whale fluke slappinghumpback whale fluke slapping


humpback whale breaching


humpback whale back


humpback whale waving its finshumpback whale waving its fins


humpback whale waving its fins


humpback whale breaching


Also, we pressed our noses on the windows of the New England Aquarium to watch the seals, so here's some seals (fur seals and regular old harbor seals.) Also some seals that were frolicking off the shores of Cape Cod...
fur seals


cute harbour sealFur seal grooming and looking fuzzy


fur seal doing something with its nose


floating harbor sealfloating harbor seal


Seals cavorting off the coast of Cape Cod