Bottlenose dolphins on Skye
We’ve been up in the western isles of Scotland for the last two weeks aboard a chartered yacht carrying out a basking shark survey. This follows on from work that we carried out between 2002-2006, and is centred around some of the more remote and exposed parts of the area that figured largely in the historical record left by the shark hunters of the last century.
And what an experience it was. The weather was (almost!) uniformly kind to us, and we achieved 95% of the coverage that we had initially planned, a really solid achievement in our first year. We recorded sharks, although not as many as we would have liked, but we had hundreds of cetaceans of six different species, plus seals, eagles, otters and everything else you could think of. It was certainly one fo the best surveys from a sightings perspective that I can remember.
How is it that we see so much when others see so little? Well, our team are trained and are looking out all of the time, in a structured manner, so we’re almost bound to see more. And with the magic ingredients of good visibility and calm seas you have a winning combination.
But there’s always another element – chance. At the end of the survey we had to take the chartered yacht back to base to be inspected, and were sitting on the mooring afterwards minding our own business when a bottlenose dolphin swam by right beside the boat. Cameras out, everyone on deck, we then saw that there were two small groups playing in amongst the moorings around us, breaching, splashing around and bumping floating buoys. As they swam outside us one exploded out of the water in a vertical breach that must have reached 30 feet – spectacular!. For nearly half an hour we were able to simply sit back and watch nature at its best, and its most unexpected. A great reward, we felt, and a suitable farewell to the islands – for the moment.
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