Subject: [Tweeters] off topic: WHALE I.D. QUESTION
Date: Sep 26 10:57:10 2008
From: Adam Sedgley - AdamS at seattleaudubon.org


Hi Tweets,

Last Saturday morning around 11am, I was at Golden Gardens (Seattle) doing a training for the Puget Sound Seabird Survey volunteers when we spotted a medium-sized cetacean moving south to north about 400m off the beach.

It had a smooth, dark (consistently-colored) back with a small crescent of a dorsal fin. The consensus amongst the group was that it was certainly too large to be the expected Harbor Porpoise. With respect to size, it appeared smaller than a Gray Whale. The dorsal fin and markings obviously ruled out Gray Whale or Orca, the only two whale species I have seen in Puget Sound. It only surfaced twice in the five minutes we were scanning for it.

I mentioned it to a group last night and someone remarked that it could have been a Minke. This picture (http://www.hickerphoto.com/data/media/40/minke-whale_2580.jpg) is certainly consistent with what I remember seeing. Wouldn't this be unusual this far south?

I attempted to contact the hotline for the Whale Museum at Friday Harbor but I just saw that my email bounced. I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a Puget Sound focused forum to see if there had been any cetacean sightings in central Puget Sound as of recent. Does one exist? Has anyone seen anything similar this past week?

Cheers,
Adam Sedgley
adams at seattleaudubon.org