While endangered right whales are perhaps best known for their presence in our area in the spring, our biggest effort for this species comes in the latter part of the year. In the fall of 2009, we will conduct our seventh consecutive year of boat-based surveys of right whales on Jeffreys Ledge (read our right whale survey blog for recent sightings).

Prior to our work, little was known about the fall and winter movements of right whales once they left their summer feeding grounds in the Bay of Fundy. In 2000, Whale Center staff led a team of researchers that published a review of sightings of right whales. We concluded that, despite a paucity of effort, there was a surprising number of fall and early winter sightings. In 2003, we conducted a "pilot" project and found right whales over 20 different individuals using the area, including four mother-calf pairs, starting in October and lasting through the end of the year. Later, a government aerial survey in February 2004 found a number of animals still there!

Based on these exciting findings, we received funds for a longer, more complete effort to look at right whale use and annual variation around the Ledge. Although federal budget restrictions limited there support to the 2004-2005 seasons, which we have since been able to obtain enough private funding to continue the effort, although not for as long as we would have desired. We would ideally like to conduct surveys from early October through January, but funding limitations, combined with rising fuel and boat costs, limited us to an eight week field season in 2007, beginning on 15 October with only 1/3 of the original budget. We felt it was critical to continue to collect a continuous time series of data on this relatively little known habitat.

We were rewarded with an amazing season, easily our best to date. We saw right whales on all but one of our 13 cruises (the sole cruise where we missed right whales we had to turn back very early due to rough seas). There were so many whales on some cruises that it was impossible to complete our transect lines because of the time we had to spend photographing and identifying individual whales! Although analysis is currently under way to see how many individuals we actually encountered, we have seen at least 40 distinctive individuals (or more than 10% of the entire population). Visit our sighting blog.