Author: myip2014

In the mist, humpbacks are calm and peaceful.

But..

In a few parts of the world, including South-eastern Alaska and ‘our’ part of British Columbia, humpbacks have developed a feeding technique called bubble-net feeding. It is a behavior they learn from each other and pass on within their own community. It can involve up to 20 whales, but we saw small groups of two or three doing this, regularly, right off Spirit Bear Lodge:

Although we are close to shore, the water is about 300 feet deep. The first sign is an easy-to-miss faint ring of bubbles, 3 – 30 meters wide, sometimes also signaled by low-flying expectant gulls. (In the photo below the righthand portion of the circle is out of shot. )

The bubbles are created by the whales well below the surface surrounding the fish, and swimming upward in a spiral blowing bubbles, which apparently creates a barrier net that the herring don’t cross, for reasons that are unclear. Once they have the fish trapped, the whales burst upwards, together, gulping gigantic mouthfuls of fish and seawater.

There are three whales in this photo, all with their mouths wide open. Look carefully. (1) Left, facing left, lower jaw in the water, upper jaw vertical. (2) Centre, upper jaw with pink palate facing us at 45 degrees, lower jaw in water pointing towards us. (3) Right, whale on its side in the water facing left, with underside of lower jaw displaying the ventral folds.

These folds expand to hold a huge volume of water and fish, mostly below the waterline in this next photo.

Once the whale has a mouthful, up to 15,000 gallons worth, it closes its mouth

The water then spills out through the baleen plates, leaving the fish inside:

This all happens fast, and usually I was looking the other way when they erupted from the depths. The whole thing was 7 seconds from bubble circle to a calm ocean and scavenging seagulls again:

It can be very dramatic: behind this group is a stunned kayaker:

In closeup the baleen fringes surrounding the pink palate are quite visible. They are 2-3 feet long, and made of keratin.

Here you can see how they work as filters:

As the whales sink beneath the surface, the ever-hopeful gulls swoop in:

This feeding behavior goes on only during the summer and fall months when the whales gorge on the rich cold-water fish stocks. They build up body fat for their migration south to their winter breeding grounds in Mexico or Hawaii.

We went everywhere by boat on this trip, and on almost every outing we saw humpbacks. This is the first of two posts, setting the scene for the climax in Part 2!

One day was devoted to heading down Knight’s Inlet towards the ocean. As luck would have it, there was thick fog, almost whiteout, which didn’t really lift till after 1pm. It was beautiful in its own way:

We could hear humpbacks blowing around us. Usually we glimpsed just a tantalizing bit of a humpback, like this tail fluke

or just the dorsal fin disappearing into the mist, under a cloud of gulls:

or more excitingly a head:

Even when the fog lifted, it would be just a sliver of back, and a wraithly blow enshrouding another gull:

Sometimes there were two, the dorsal fin and humped back of one in mid-dive (how it got its name); and the final tail flourish of another at the end of its dive:

Individuals can be identified by their tail fin. I sent this photo in to the Happy Whale database, and they ID’ed it as Spectrum, aka BCY0944, first identified in 2004. He/she honeymoons in Hawaii, where he/she was sighted off Maui in 2019, and(update!) off Maui in 2025. That’s a 5400 mile round trip. https://happywhale.com/individual/68229;enc=321622

Occasionally, you see an entire whale, but obviously not when you are pointing your camera that way and have it in focus. (Mark Carwardine will have sharp beautifully lit shots of this behavior, but this is my blog, so you are stuck with my fuzzy ones.) For unknown reasons , humpbacks breach, the name for an explosive jump right out of the water, with no warning, taking a brief two seconds till it has disappeared once more:

In relative slow motion they backflop down, one pectoral fin raised skywards in a Roman valedictory wave:

You can just discern the white underside of that same pectoral fin amidst the plumes of spray below:

Adult humpbacks are up to 17 m (56 ft) long, or 1.5 double-decker buses, and weigh up to 44 US tons (40,000 Kg) , so the ensuing splash is quite magnificent.

This jump consumed as much energy as a 60Kg human uses to run a marathon.

There is an excellent discussion of breach behavior here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7065906/

in which the authors report that Segre et al. (2020) call a breach the “most expensive burst maneuver” in all of nature, pushing the boundaries of muscular performance and providing an honest signal of a whale’s general health. That would send an important signal to surrounding males, and might make the energy expenditure worthwhile.

PS Humpbacks are, on the whole, a conservation success story. The US has now removed 9 of the 14 sub-populations from the endangered species list, including the ones like Spectrum that breed in Hawaii. But 5 sub-populations are still on the list, and categorized as threatened because their numbers are still low. This includes the ones that breed in Mexico, where some of the ones we saw most likely go. On the bright side, at least some go to Hawaii! And all humpbacks are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the international ban on commercial whaling.

PPS Next time, bubble-netting.

We have just returned from a wonderful trip to the coast of British Columbia to see bears. For the next few weeks I will share with you what we saw. For those who are interested in the details of exactly where we were, and who organized it, read the PS at the end.

I start with the Spirit Bear, for me the Holy Grail of the trip. Spirit Bears are properly called Kermode Bears (Ursus americanus kermodei).They are not albinos, but white Black Bears, just as yellow Labs are beige Black Labs. The Great Bear Rainforest has one particular bear population that harbors a recessive gene for this unusual coloration, and 10% of the cubs are born with creamy coats. Here is a female:

They are found mainly on the islands of Gribbell, Princess Royal, and Roderick, 500 miles north of Vancouver, and it is estimated there may be only about a hundred white ones in total. Which is why seeing one is nothing short of magical.

We had landed from a small Zodiac and were sitting on logs in the rain

when she emerged on the far bank of the river, about 75m away. (Chris described it as 1 1/2 Olympic swimming pools from us!)

Worth the wait:

She spent 25 minutes entertaining us, clearly aware of our presence, but not too bothered.

In October, they are fattening themselves up for hibernation and eating pretty much nothing but salmon, either live salmon swimming up river to spawn, or dead salmon whose life’s mission to procreate is now done. In this next set of photos she is fishing for Pink Salmon:

The dead ones are easy pickings, as you can see in this video:

The fish would get stuck under the banks and roots, so she poked around in the overhangs:

and looked deep into the water (or maybe at her own reflection?):

She probably weighed about 300lbs, in prime condition. Males can be much larger. Eventually she melted back into the forest,

but a couple of hours later, as we re-boarded our boat, she appeared on the rocky foreshore:

had a good scratch:

and settled down to watch us watching her.

The First Nations of this area are the Kitasoo/Xai’xais and they have many legends about these bears, some collected in a book entitled Feathers and Feastfires. The creator, Wee’get the Raven, “set an island aside to be the home of the White Bear People, then went among the black bears, and every tenth one he made white, and decreed that they would never leave the island for here they could live in peace forever.” Hunting them is prohibited.

PS I’m updating this post because I have just watched the Forests episode of David Attenborough’s and the BBC’s new Planet Earth III, which includes a wonderful sequence on “this forests’s rarest resident”, the spirit bear. Watch it if you can.

PPS We went with Wildlife Worldwide, https://www.wildlifeworldwide.com, accompanied by Chris Breen the company founder (left) and Mark Carwardine, a renowned naturalist and photographer of Last Chance to See Fame. An excellent double-act:

We stayed in two lodges, Knight’s Inlet Lodge (orange star at centre of map, a float plane ride from Campbell River,), and Spirit Bear Lodge (orange star in top left of map, a 90-min boat ride from Bella Bella,) Both lodges are wholly owned by the First Nations. The coast is a misty maze of forested granite-edged fjords, and the only way to get around is by boat. As a result we also saw humpbacks, orcas, and sea otters, as you will see.

It was a rather quiet summer and fall, wildlife-wise, in Maine, and anyway I had an abundance of Pantanal things to show you, but now I am back at base camp, and I thought I’d dig out some favorite photos from the last few months at home before telling you about my most recent trip… to see bears!

Most of these photos don’t come with any particular story, they are just for you to enjoy.

Woodpeckers worldwide just ooze character, and the Pantanal has a range of species. I already showed you a Campo Flicker. But how about this Cream-backed Woodpecker, Campephilus leucopogon, a dead ringer for Woody the Woodpecker of cartoon fame:

It refused to come out of its nesthole, but in the second photo you can admire its crest, and just glimpse its white back:

Much more discreetly colored is the Pale-crested Woodpecker, Celeus lugubris, feeding deep in the trees:

She is a female; the male has a red cheek patch.

And conveniently out in the open, the boringly named White Woodpecker, Melanerpes candidus, gives us a beady eye:

It takes me happy to tell you that none of these is thought to be endangered.

PS I mistyped ‘happy’ in the last sentence, and my spellchecker serendipitously autocorrected so it read “It makes me hoopoe to tell you”, which seemed appropriate.

PPS This is my last post from the Pantanal. It’s not that there is not even more to show you, but it feels like time to move on, at least for now!

The star mammals are of course jaguars and tapirs, but there are other mammals to be seen too. At dusk, we often saw small delicate crab-eating foxes, Cerdocyon thous, usually in pairs:

They do not immediately run off, so we got a good look:

As their name suggests, they eat crabs, but also small mammals, amphibians, fruit, pretty much anything, including kitchen scraps from lodges. I found them rather charming.

The most ubiquitous and laughable mammals are the capybaras, Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris, although we saw far more of them ten years ago in the Northern Pantanal than we did in the south. They are like giant guineapig/beaver crosses, and are the world’s largest rodents.. This mother and baby hung out near Caiman Lodge.

The guides had named the baby Bean.

An adult male can weigh 50Kg, and makes a good meal for a caiman. The dock at the lodge is a pretty safe space:

They are vegetarian, and eat water plants especially. An egret is standing on the submerged shoulders of this one:

A family group were grazing in the shallows, and some unseen predator, almost certainly a caiman, made a charge from the left. Look carefully and you can glimpse two tiny babies in front of the leaping adult’s back, peering out through the water hyacinths as the adults scatter:

They have a large scent gland bump between their eyes:

and they rub this against the lower branches of trees to mark their territory:

Finally, the Coati, Nasua nasua, a relative of the raccoon, and also an omnivore. We saw solitary males on three occasions, but only briefly. This one was on the far side of the river, and stayed visible for long enough to photograph :

On our previous trip, we saw large groups of females and youngsters, like this, often with their tails in the air:

The Pantanal would be a good place to be a pirate: a big choice of macaws, parrots and parakeets to carry on your shoulder. That very desirability is, of course, why the pet trade poses such a threat to some of these birds. Here, in no particular order, is a gallery of the ones I managed to photograph:

At first my overactive imagination thought that this one was using a tool, but disappointingly it was just chewing on a grassy seedhead.

and just underneath it on the same fencepost was a Campo Flicker, a ground-feeding woodpecker:

Flashes of color in every tree.

To get you in the mood, listen to this video while you read the rest of this post. It is Martin Nystrom’s As the Deer played by the NewWin4 String Quartet:

There are four species of deer in the Pantanal, all food for jaguars! The Pampas Deer is very similar to the American White-tailed Deer, but smaller.

The males were still growing this year’s antlers:

The does, of course, have no antlers.

When they are scared they raise their small tail in imitation of their North American cousins, though I never did get one to do this for my camera. This one is running from a nearby jaguar, but the cattle tyrant on its back is still hanging on.

There are two small species of Brocket Deer, shy solitary woodland creatures. This is the Brown Brocket Deer (also called Grey):

The male has tiny spiky antlers:

Its cousin is this a male Red Brocket Deer.

It was with its mate and a tiny fawn, and our vehicle separated them on opposite sides of the road. The fawn inspected us warily:

The largest deer in the Pantanal is the Marsh Deer, 1.2m tall and 2 long. It likes long reeds and grasses, with just the head rising above the marsh:

Out in the open their size is more apparent, towering over the egret and the kiskadee in the foreground.

Meanwhile, back here in Maine, we have only one species, the White-tailed Deer. A doe and two still-spotted fawns were caught on my game camera two weeks ago. Notice how long their black-and-white tails are compared to the Pampas deer. (I fear that to watch the whole video and see the charming fawns you may have to scroll back up and turn the music off. )

If the music is still playing, relax and let it soothe your spirit.

Last time, I showed you ground birds. These, by contrast, live in the trees, as proper birds do.

The White-throated Piping Guan, Pipile grayi, is a handsome chap.

I find it surprising that a bird this large (about 69cm long) lives almost entirely in trees, foraging for fruit. It looks like a ground bird, but isn’t. It has a white wattle under its chin:

It is found in a fairly small area, including Eastern Bolivia, Southwest Brazil, and Northern Paraguay. Under pressure from habitat loss and hunting, its population is thought to be in decline, and the IUCN classifies it as Near Threatened. It is still pretty common in the Pantanal, I am glad to say.

Here is a gallery of a few more handsome feathered pinups:

I think you’ve got the picture: the Pantanal is paradise if you like birds, but beware of going with birders if you don’t! You will spend long hours as the sun sets and the cocktail hour beckons, waiting while they admire yet another new species.

The Red-legged Seriema, Cariama cristata, is a delicate ground bird, about three feet high, with pink legs and beak, pale blue eye-shadow and a crest on the bridge of its nose (well, beak). Sort of like a punk mustache.

It wanders around the grasslands feeding on insects, small snakes, even mice and also grains and seeds. When it finds a snake, it kills it by shaking it hard and beating it on the ground.

It is often with its mate:

Occasionally they are in larger groups, like these. The local people say that if one stands on a termite mound, rain is coming.

They do not seem to be endangered, though they are sparse, but they are found across a large area in the grasslands south of the Amazon, from E. Bolivia to the Atlantic. Their habitat may even be increasing, as deforestation creates more of the open areas they like.

Among the large ground birds we saw, my other top favorite is the Bare-faced Curassow, Crax fasciolata, winner of the “Best Hairdo in the Pantanal” contest. Here is the male:

and here is his girlfriend:

The male is up to 85cm long and weighs as much as 2.8Kg, like a big chicken or a very small turkey. They eat mainly fruit, and seeds.

They are probably monogamous, but very little is known about their social lives. Classified as Vulnerable, the Pantanal is one place where they are still fairly common.