Pilot Whales in Tralee Bay
Today we spent the best part of the day watching a pod of ca. ten pilot whales in Sandy Bay near Castlegregory. While this may sound like a nice activity it has infact been a quite distressing experience, because this particular bay is at best five metres deep, and pilot whales are a deep water species. They can easily become completely disorientated in a shallow environment like that. Worse still, the same pod had already stranded once yesterday evening only a few hundred metres further up the bay, but the whales could be successfully refloated.
We had to leave the beach after more than five hours and at that time the pod was still circling very close to the shore (wmv-video, 8.5MB) with members of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group trying to persuade them to leave the bay. I hope they will find a way out of the shallows tonight, but sadly I am not very hopeful for them.
Update 31/07/09: It looks like the whales luckily found out of the bay, as they did not live strand tonight and currently no strandings are reported from the Tralee Bay area. More information can be obtained from the website of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.
The whales are back in Sandy Bay tonight, but please don’t follow them with motor boats or kayacks or swimming as this causes them unnecessary stress. Look, don’t touch.
Comment by emurf — August 1, 2009 @ 10:09 pm