Ocean voyeurs have a whale of a time

THROUGHOUT the month of July seven ships and three aircraft will be deployed off the western coast of Europe mapping the distribution and the abundance of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

It’s a multinational research effort supported by the EU LIFE programme and coordinated from Scotland.

But there will be three Irish observers from University College Cork involved and two of the survey vessels will be working in Irish waters, covering the western seaboard and the Celtic Sea. The Irish Sea and some of our inshore waters and estuaries will be surveyed by aircraft.

The project aims to update information from a 1994 survey called SCANS.

This month’s survey is called SCANS-11 and the results won’t be fully collated until sometime next year.

At the same time, hundreds of people around the Irish coast will be whale watching more for pleasure than for science. This will culminate on National Whale Watch Day on July 31. This is a free event organised at 10 different venues along the coast by the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group. It’s fun, it’s child-friendly and it’s a great introduction to whale watching if you’ve never done it before and are curious.

The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group also run a series of weekend whale watching courses on Cape Clear Island, which is a prime site. For more details about these log on to their website at www.iwdg.ie.

Whale watching is becoming very popular. If you go to the same website and click on ‘operators’ you’ll discover that there are a number of commercial whale watching tours available around the coast. These are boat-based rather than shore-based and a well-equipped boat with a skipper who knows his stuff gives you a very good chance of observing these magnificent mammals at close quarters.

Apart from Dingle’s famous dolphin Fungie, some of the highlights of Irish boat-based whale watching are the trips from Carrigaholt in south Clare to view the school of bottle-nosed dolphins in the Shannon estuary. If you’re more interested in watching larger whales from a boat, you could consider a trip from Reen Pier near Union Hall in West Cork. Recently they’ve had very close views of fin whales which, after the blue whale, are the largest animal that’s ever lived. Blue whales are occasionally heard through hydrophones off the south and west coasts.

Up until quite recently we had no idea of the numbers and variety of the whales, dolphins and porpoises round our coast. Nowadays Ireland is reckoned to be the best country in Europe for shore-based whale watching and there seem to be more sightings every year. There are two reasons for this.

One is that whales are actually increasing in numbers because commercial whaling - while it hasn’t been completely eliminated - has been reduced considerably. The second, and more important reason, is simply that there are now far more people looking for whales.

There’s a bit of a knack to spotting a whale. Most of the time when you look at the sea you either look at the shore line or the horizon. You need to start looking in between the two. You also need to know what to look for. A whale’s ‘blow’, the spout of steamy breath when it exhales after a dive, is one of these things. Sea bird activity over the surface can often indicate whales below. And often the tail fluke of a whale or the back fin of a dolphin will show as a dark patch against the paler surface of the sea.

Some of these signs are easier to spot in the morning or the evening in the more horizontal light. Whale watching is a 12-month a year activity and, if you have the right outdoor clothing and the right temperament, the winter months can often produce the best sightings, particularly of the larger species.

Apart from good clothing, you don’t really need a huge amount of equipment to go whale watching. Binoculars are pretty essential. They should be 7X50s for boat work, anything more powerful is very hard to use from the heaving deck of a small or medium-sized boat. For shore watching 10 or 12 magnification glasses are better and a telescope on a tripod can be very useful.

The other essential is a good field guide. I often use the small and inexpensive Collins Gem Guide to whales and dolphins. It’s accurate and contains a huge amount of information on whale watching and whale natural history in addition to the identification material.

It will also tell you what the difference is between a whale, a dolphin and a porpoise. The answer is that there really isn’t a difference. These are popular not scientific divisions. Usually the word ‘whale’ is used for the big species, ‘dolphin’ for the medium-sized ones and ‘porpoise’ for the smaller ones - but there’s a lot of overlap and a lack of logic in the whole thing.

So if you want to try whale watching, where should you go? The best place to start would be to either take a commercial whale watching tour or go on an Irish Whale and Dolphin Group outing. If you want to be independent, go to any promontory, headland or peninsula that has deep water close inshore and allows you to stand on a cliff a good height above water level. The south and west coasts are best, but large whales have been spotted in the Irish Sea close to Dublin in the past few weeks.

There is a list of 10 popular spots for whale watching in the box on the left.

Enjoy it.