A Day on Carmena

Early four-thirty start this morning to prepare for a day at sea on Carmena; one of a fleet of three small vessels on this project, with a six meter aluminum hull and a bow sprit for ease of tagging. The pre-dawn conditions as usual started out glassy, with not the slightest ripple over the bar crossing; the Noosa River as clear as Mike the project coordinator has ever seen it. Little Pied Cormorants with their white faces and black cloaks stood proud and perched on green and red channel markers, an Eastern Great Egret snow white with yellow bill lurked amongst numerous Little Egrets, stalking juvenile fish along the sandy green back dropped banks as we motored along the meandering flow of water. Before I could finish devouring my cheesy bacon bun and guzzling down a large long black, we were out past the Noosa headland and searching for a south bound “tag friendly” pod.

Straight off the bat we happened upon a mother humpback with her calf. The calf was easy to recognize with a pale cream colored patch on its peduncle (tail stalk). This pod was extremely evasive, changing direction whenever we’d come in for a close approach. Our goal was to slap on a D-tag, a device that records the whales pitch, roll, depth, and acoustics, for a programmed duration of four hours, which is held firmly to the whale via four suction cups, and is administered with a long three meter carbon fiber poll. Once the programmed four hours is up, the suction cups release and the tag floats to the surface, and begins transmitting beeps over a radio frequency, allowing us to find the tag with a directional radio antenna. We struggled to get within tagging range for about fifteen minutes before bailing onto a second pod, this one a mother and calf with an escort, that surfaced several hundred meters away. We nearly managed to tag the escort before it dove, but the pod adopted the same evasive behaviors as the previous mother calf. After another fifteen minutes of fumbling around with pod #2, we gave up and headed for a third pod called in from the hill team; another mom calf pair that had been logging at the surface for some time just a few hundred meters off Sunshine Beach. Of course as soon as we approached they ceased logging and begin avoiding us. After several minutes our tagging window closed, we were out of time.

We spent the remainder of the morning following the third mother calf pair for what is referred to as a “focal follow”, where someone stands on the bow sprit with a micro track and headset, and calls out every behavior the whales make at the surface, including the distance, direction, and heading of the pod. Focal follows last four hours, so that’s four hours of following a single pod while observing and recording its every move. I did the first half of the focal follow, and transcribed it looks something like this:

“Blow from the calf. Blow from the mom. Blow from the calf. Blow from the mom. Fluke up dive from the mom. Round out from the calf. 50 meters to the NE, whales heading south.”

15 minutes pass…

“Blow from the calf. Blow from the mom. Back from the calf. BREACH! from the mom.”

Sounds of chewing a turkey sandwich…more chewing

“Blow from mom. Blow from calf. 70 meters to the NE still heading south”

…..etc etc for the next 3 hours and 45 minutes.

It can be and often is incredibly dull. Luckily the unmistakable gliding flight of Short-tailed Shearwaters, the same bird I worked with last year in Tasmania whose razor beaks left lasting scars on my hands, and the occasional dive bombs of foraging Australian Gannets, kept my imagination occupied. Once the focal follow ended we zipped over to Peregian Beach, where I jumped off and swam back in through the surf, while Carmena went back out to dive on some of the acoustic buoys (pronounced boys here) that were in desperate need of repair. I finished the day trying to finish Carl Safina’s latest book “View from Lazy Point”, and incredibly good read about the changing of seasons in an ever changing increasingly anthro-dominated world.