Welcome to Whale Tales. This blog is currently under construction. The pictures and information about the whales will not change, but I will be updating this Introduction, my About Me page, and the Copyright page. The table of contents will be finalized and then I will start posting more entries.
24 years worth of notes, observations and photographs make a very large pile. If I stacked all my notebooks and albums on top of each other it would be over 6' tall. Here they all sit in my office, threatening, like those National Geographic magazines in the attic, to collapse the floor with their weight. I have made many attempts to write a book but end up feeling stilted and isolated... I am not a writer by choice anymore than I am a computer geek or blogger. They are tools.
In that six feet of words and pictures there are stories, stories about seals that I have watched for eight years or more, stories about humpback whales that have captured my heart, stories about how I ended up spending most of my adult life doing this. And they aren't doing any good making my office floor groan... so here goes.
In this whaleblog, I will upload photographs and tell the stories of my encounter with whales during my two summers as naturalist on a whale watch boat. Whales can be identified by the patterns of white and black on the underside of their fluke. There is Fissure, Olympia, Tusk and Talon, humpback whales that we met repeatedly and who seemed to enjoy our encounter as much as we did.
I have set up a table of contents that will help you find the major parts of the story. There will be a link to beginning of each individual whales story and also a link to the beginning of each encounter with that whale... I will not not link to each post.
I hope people will ask me questions and give suggestions to help me clarify what and how I say things. I hope other naturalists who are doing long term studies of an animal species will add their thoughts.
Jane Goodall has been my inspiration and I dedicate this blog to her.