Strait flush for whale watchers

CONSERVATION DEPARTMENT

BOUND FOR TROPICS: There were antics aplenty as dozens of humpback whales swam through Cook Strait after a full moon last week. Forty-six humpbacks were sighted by watchers, up from 37 last year.

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Forty-six humpback whales and one sperm whale were sighted during the four-week Cook Strait whale survey.

The survey, which ended on Saturday, counts whales to assess how the species is recovering since commercial whaling was outlawed in 1964. The mammals had been close to extinction.

The survey also studies migration patterns.

"The number of whales that we are seeing now is 12 per cent of the 1960 number of whales," Conservation Department marine ecologist Nadine Bott said.

Last year 37 humpback whales and four pygmy blue whales were recorded, but this did not mean an increase because the timing of migrations varied, she said.

Former whalers employed by the department were on whale-watching duty from dawn to dusk at Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds. "They were once out there hunting whales and now they are working with us to protect the whales," Mrs Bott said.

Former whaler Joe Heberley said that, apart from the wintry weather "which was dead against us", it was good to be part of the project, which is in its sixth year.

Dozens of whales swam through the strait after a full moon last week.

"That seems to be the trend, it seems to be a flush of whales on the full moon," Mr Heberley said. Whaling was big business in the 1950s and 1960s but whalers turned conservationists when they realised how numbers had collapsed.

Whales spend the summer in Antarctica and migrate to the tropics for winter with the first sightings in New Zealand waters reported in May.

There are an estimated 2000 humpback whales in the Pacific and 10,000 in the southern hemisphere.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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