Crew and passengers on a whale-watching tour in the Bay of Fundy off Long Island last week had an unexpected 
encounter.
They spotted and photographed a bowhead whale, an Arctic-dwelling species that doesn’t usually come this far south.
Capt. Todd Sollows of Pirate’s Cove Whale and Seabird Cruises in Tiverton first thought it was a rare North Atlantic right whale when the mammal was spotted last Wednesday.
“I was heading for three humpbacks and spotted it and thought it looked kind of odd because it was acting differently,” said Sollows, who has been doing whale-watching tours for 23 years.
As he came closer he couldn’t see any callosities — the telltale callouses that identify right whales.
“It was turning away from us and definitely wasn’t used to boats and didn’t want to be watched,” Sollows said.
He told the guide to take some pictures, because “it was the queerest looking right whale I’ve ever seen. Then I said, kind of jokingly, ‘unless it’s a bowhead,’ and laughed it off because I’ve never heard tell of bowheads in the Bay of Fundy.”
He was talking to whale researchers from the New England Aquarium, stationed in Lubec, Maine, and descibed what he had seen and sent down photos.
“They said, ‘Oh, funny you should mention that, because we saw a bowhead last week.’”
He said it’s quite obvious looking at the photos, “but at the time you’re thinking that it doesn’t make sense that it could be a bowhead.”
He said he has only seen one of the whales before in pictures, and can add it to the list of unusual visitors he has spotted that also includes a blue whale.
“You never know what you’re going to see in the Bay of Fundy I guess.”
The bowhead’s normal range doesn’t bring it much farther south than Baffin Island, so a sighting in the Bay of Fundy is most unusual, says Dalhousie University professor Hal Whitehead.
While the Basque whalers were taking bowheads in the Strait of Belle Isle and along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the 16th century, “they’re almost never seen south of northern Labrador these days.”
The bowhead is a relative of the right whale and eats plankton, but Whitehead doesn’t think the whale in the Bay of Fundy was following food.
“I would say it was lost, the poor thing,” he said. “They’re closely associated, or near to ice, so this is the wrong move. The ice is disappearing from a lot of their normal habitat in the summer months, but what’s left is north, not south.”
He said he hasn’t heard of a bowhead in Nova Scotia waters or even south of Newfoundland in recent times.
He said more is known about the bowhead whales in the western Arctic because they migrate south past Alaska, “but the eastern Arctic ones are much more of a mystery.”
He said he suspects that the whale would have to make its way back north to survive because the food supply will dry up in the fall, when right whales move south again. He’s not sure it will survive the trip here, let alone if it follows the right whales south.
“That bowhead may be eating the same plankton that the right whales are in the Bay of Fundy and that may do it fine for a while, but that food source disappears in a few months. The right whales go south, and hopefully this guy will go north to where there are other bowheads.”
He said younger whales are the more likely ones to be lost.