Rare Right Whale Snacks Off Chatham’s Eastern Coast

by Tim Wood

            CHATHAM --- As beach patrol members Jim Patterson and Kelly Hebert were driving along the outside shore on North Beach last Wednesday, Hebert noticed what she at first thought was a log bobbing in the water about 50 to 75 yards offshore.

            Then the log went underwater and came back up again. That’s when she noticed the callosities.

            The white patches of calcified skin gave away the identity of the creature: a North Atlantic right whale.    

Images of a North Atlantic right whale feeding just yards off North Beach, captured last Wednesday by Kelly Hebert of the Chatham Beach Patrol.  PHOTOS COURTESY OF KELLY HEBERT

        While it isn’t unusual to see whales off Chatham’s eastern shore, Jim Hain, a senior scientist with the Associated Scientists at Woods Hole, said in an email that he hadn’t heard reports of a North Atlantic right whale that close to the beach.  Right whales are sometimes seen from shore in areas in northeastern Florida, on Sandy Neck and of course Provincetown, where a group of feeding right whales have been putting on a spectacular show in recent weeks.

            Hain’s group works on the Marineland Right Whale Project, which tracks the right whale migration along the Florida coast, where the animals sometimes come within a quarter mile of the shore, according to its website (www.aswh.org).

            North Atlantic right whales are among the rarest species on the planet.  According to the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, the population numbers between 350 and 400.

            The Chatham whale may have been one of those seen in Cape Cod Bay recently, and was moving to waters farther offshore.

            “It was either transiting, feeding or transiting and feeding,” he said in the email.  “The Cape Cod area is a productive feeding area, so we can guess that feeding is involved in some way.”

            Hebert and Patterson spotted the whale, which she said appeared to measure three lengths of their beach patrol truck, or about 50 feet, between trails five and six on the outer beach at about 3:30 p.m.  It was heading south, toward the new inlet. They notified the Cape Cod Marine Mammal Stranding Network and the Coast Guard station.

            “They advised us to stay with it and call them back once it cleared the breach,” Hebert said.

            As the whale fed, Hebert clicked away with her digital camera, capturing some arresting images of the cetacean.  After about half an hour, as the whale neared the inlet, “it hung a huge left, and that was the end of it,” she said.

            Hebert forwarded the photos to the New England Aquarium, which as of Tuesday was still trying to identify the animal.  The uniqueness of the right whale’s callosities make it possible to identify individual animals, and the aquarium maintains a database of those that have been identified.  An email from Philip Hamilton of the aquarium stated that he was confident the animal Hebert photographed was a one-year-old whale, possibly one of several calves born in 2006-2007 off Florida or Georgia.

5/15/08