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Duncan Murrell - A Whale of a Time

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Duncan Murrell - A Whale of a Time

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  • Kayaking- Gulf-of-California37.jpg
  • It was amazing to get in the water with the sea lions and witness their graceful speed and agility. They were curious about me as soon as I appeared. This is a popular destination for swimming with sea lions so that are very habituated to the presence of people in the water with them. It was mostly younger juveniles that I could see, with the occasional large bull, which although large seemed quite small in comparison with the Steller sea lions in Alaska.
    Kayaking- Gulf-of-California35.jpg
  • Palawan-assorted4.tif
  • One of my first amazing encounters on the trip was this large pod of long-beaked common dolphins. I was paddling quite close to the precipitous rocky shoreline and was just skirting a small bay when I could suddenly hear what sounded like a white water river rushing towards me. I looked around me to locate the source of the noise and saw that the flat calm sea was erupting with a myriad of splashes and leaping dolphins ploughing towards me. Within seconds the water around me was energised by hundreds of dolphins dashing in different directions. Everything was happening so quickly that I didn’t know where to aim my camera next so I had to deploy the shoot from the hip mode. They were evidently herding fish around the bay, so I just sat in the middle of the vortex of feeding dolphins and soaked up the visual energy and excitement.
    Kayaking- Gulf-of-California30.jpg
  • This was one of the very rare occasions when a humpback whale ever showed any aggression towards me. I always tried to avoid obstructing the passage of whales but with so many encounters it was inevitable that sometimes I didn’t have enough time to get out of their way, especially if they surfaced in front of me without any warning. Even then I was often amazed at how they would just roll beneath me like a gigantic ball caressing the soft hull of my kayak with barely a ripple. But on this occasion I encountered a slightly more irritable whale and as it was sounding (diving), instead of just lifting its flukes up before sliding gracefully out of view, it rolled its flukes sideways, creating a large wave that surged towards me, over the bow of my kayak and onto my lap. The icy water of Southeast Alaska was always cold enough to give me a sharp intake of breath, and some degree of punishment for not giving way to a much larger vessel fast enough!
    Alaska-camping-kayaking23.jpg
  • This photo was taken by one of the leading humpback whale researchers in Southeast Alaska at the time, Cynthia D’Vincent. She was actually working with a film crew at the time who were making an IMAX film. We had a lot of encounters during the filming and she pointed out that I was getting into "rather too many" of their shots, and politely asked me if I could try to avoid doing that. I was getting fed up with having to breathe in the exhaust fumes from their fast boats, whilst I was left rocking in their wake. I continued to work in my usual low impact fashion, but eventually they got all of the shots that they needed and I was thanked for obliging with her request, and I was rewarded with a bottle of wine. <br />
The unusual lighting, and atmospheric conditions at sunset, was a result of an extensive forest fire in the Yukon Territory hundreds of miles away to the northeast.
    Alaska-camping-kayaking26.jpg
  • Reproductively mature male sea lions aggregate on traditional rookeries in May, usually on beaches on isolated islands. A week or so later, adult females arrive, accompanied occasionally by sexually immature offspring, and form fluid aggregations throughout the rookery. Steller sea lions are polygamous but they do not coerce individual females into harems but control spatial territories among which females freely move about. Pregnant females give birth soon after arriving on a rookery, and copulation generally occurs one to two weeks after giving birth, but the fertilized egg does not become implanted in the uterus until the autumn. After about a week of nursing, females start taking increasingly longer foraging trips, leaving the pups behind until in late summer when they both leave the rookery. Males fast until August, often without returning to the water, after which time the rookeries break up and most animals leave for the open seas and disperse throughout their range.<br />
Steller sea lions are predated upon by orcas and I actually witnessed the death of one bull that had become quite attached to me. It had been showing so much interest in me and it even raised its head out of the water right in front of me to have a good look with its bulging eyes. A short while later I heard a commotion in the distance and saw that a pod of transient orcas had arrived on the scene and were systematically charging the sea lion and thrashing it with their flukes. It was a difficult event to witness, especially whenever the big bull re-appeared on the surface gasping for breath. It took the orcas about 15 minutes to finally kill it and not long after that they were attacking some humpback whales that had strayed onto the scene. It was an exhilarating experience to be paddling my kayak so close to a pod of orcas engaged in a hunt, but they showed no interest in me. It was one of those occasions when I wished that I’d had someone else with me to witness such an amazing spectacle.
    Alaska-Steller-sealion1.jpg
  • Reproductively mature male sea lions aggregate on traditional rookeries in May, usually on beaches on isolated islands. A week or so later, adult females arrive, accompanied occasionally by sexually immature offspring, and form fluid aggregations throughout the rookery. Steller sea lions are polygamous but they do not coerce individual females into harems but control spatial territories among which females freely move about. Pregnant females give birth soon after arriving on a rookery, and copulation generally occurs one to two weeks after giving birth, but the fertilized egg does not become implanted in the uterus until the autumn. After about a week of nursing, females start taking increasingly longer foraging trips, leaving the pups behind until in late summer when they both leave the rookery. Males fast until August, often without returning to the water, after which time the rookeries break up and most animals leave for the open seas and disperse throughout their range.<br />
Steller sea lions are predated upon by orcas and I actually witnessed the death of one bull that had become quite attached to me. It had been showing so much interest in me and it even raised its head out of the water right in front of me to have a good look with its bulging eyes. A short while later I heard a commotion in the distance and saw that a pod of transient orcas had arrived on the scene and were systematically charging the sea lion and thrashing it with their flukes. It was a difficult event to witness, especially whenever the big bull re-appeared on the surface gasping for breath. It took the orcas about 15 minutes to finally kill it and not long after that they were attacking some humpback whales that had strayed onto the scene. It was an exhilarating experience to be paddling my kayak so close to a pod of orcas engaged in a hunt, but they showed no interest in me. It was one of those occasions when I wished that I’d had someone else with me to witness such an amazing spectacle.
    wildlife-3.tif
  • This was one of the very rare occasions when a humpback whale ever showed any aggression towards me. I always tried to avoid obstructing the passage of whales but with so many encounters it was inevitable that sometimes I didn’t have enough time to get out of their way, especially if they surfaced in front of me without any warning. Even then I was often amazed at how they would just roll beneath me like a gigantic ball caressing the soft hull of my kayak with barely a ripple. But on this occasion I encountered a slightly more irritable whale and as it was sounding (diving), instead of just lifting its flukes up before sliding gracefully out of view, it rolled its flukes sideways, creating a large wave that surged towards me, over the bow of my kayak and onto my lap. The icy water of Southeast Alaska was always cold enough to give me a sharp intake of breath, and some degree of punishment for not giving way to a much larger vessel fast enough!
    Alaska-camping-kayaking24.jpg
  • Reproductively mature male sea lions aggregate on traditional rookeries in May, usually on beaches on isolated islands. A week or so later, adult females arrive, accompanied occasionally by sexually immature offspring, and form fluid aggregations throughout the rookery. Steller sea lions are polygamous but they do not coerce individual females into harems but control spatial territories among which females freely move about. Pregnant females give birth soon after arriving on a rookery, and copulation generally occurs one to two weeks after giving birth, but the fertilized egg does not become implanted in the uterus until the autumn. After about a week of nursing, females start taking increasingly longer foraging trips, leaving the pups behind until in late summer when they both leave the rookery. Males fast until August, often without returning to the water, after which time the rookeries break up and most animals leave for the open seas and disperse throughout their range.<br />
Steller sea lions are predated upon by orcas and I actually witnessed the death of one bull that had become quite attached to me. It had been showing so much interest in me and it even raised its head out of the water right in front of me to have a good look with its bulging eyes. A short while later I heard a commotion in the distance and saw that a pod of transient orcas had arrived on the scene and were systematically charging the sea lion and thrashing it with their flukes. It was a difficult event to witness, especially whenever the big bull re-appeared on the surface gasping for breath. It took the orcas about 15 minutes to finally kill it and not long after that they were attacking some humpback whales that had strayed onto the scene. It was an exhilarating experience to be paddling my kayak so close to a pod of orcas engaged in a hunt, but they showed no interest in me. It was one of those occasions when I wished that I’d had someone else with me to witness such an amazing spectacle.
    Alaska-Steller-sealion2.jpg
  • A humpback whale sounds dramatically and forcefully in front of the Nautiraid kayak of Duncan Murrell, Peril Strait, near Chatham Strait, Southeast Alaska, USA.<br />
<br />
This was one of the very rare occasions when a humpack whale ever showed any aggression towards me. I always tried to avoid obstructing the passage of whales but with so many encounters it was inevitable that sometimes I didn’t have enough time to get out of their way, especially if they surfaced in front of me without any warning. Even then I was often amazed at how they would just roll beneath me like a gigantic ball caressing the soft hull of my kayak with barely a ripple. But on this occasion I encountered a slightly more irritable whale and as it was sounding (diving), instead of just lifting its flukes up before sliding gracefully out of view, it rolled its flukes sideways, creating a large wave that surged towards me, over the bow of my kayak and onto my lap. The icy water of Southeast Alaska was always cold enough to give me a sharp intake of breath, and some degree of punishment for not giving way to a much larger vessel fast enough!
    Whaleman-15.tif
  • If I wasn’t kayaking at sea looking for humpback whales then the Stikine River was one of my favourite place to be. What an amazing, breathtaking river that is, which provides a valuable natural highway for wild animals from the interior and opens out onto a spectacular river delta. When I remember Alaska, it is somewhere that I always return to in my dreams, to feel the vastness of open vistas that Alaska provides.<br />
The Stikine River is a river, historically also the Stickeen River, approximately 610 km (379 mi) long,[1] in northwestern British Columbia in Canada and in southeast Alaska in the United States. Considered one of the last truly wild major rivers in British Columbia, it drains a rugged, largely pristine, area east of the Coast Mountains, cutting a fast-flowing course through the mountains in deep glacier-lined gorges to empty into Eastern Passage, just north of the city of Wrangell, which is situated at the north end of Wrangell Island in the Alexander Archipelago.
    Alaska-trees-waterfall1.jpg