06.06.2024 – The call before the storm

Well, I wouldn’t call it exactly a quiet morning on the ocean. Indeed, we managed to use a small weather window between yesterday’s windy and today’s very wet afternoon, discovering three different groups of acrobatic and playful dolphins.

One of the fastest, most acrobatic, yet often evasive Striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba) was the first group to encounter. Also today they seemed to play hide and seek, reason enough to leave these beauties by themselves after a few minutes. Luckily, we soon found another, very differently behaving species – the playful Spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis). The small group seemed to be feeding, amongst with one of our most charismatic seabirds – the Cory’s shearwater (Calonectris borealis). These large birds are skilled divers in search of their prey, which is the reason we call them “Sturmtaucher” in German, or, why not being more specific, “Gelbschnabelsturmtaucher”, the “yellow-billed-storm-diver”. Well, our yellow-billed-storm-divers have an excellent sense of smell, detecting swarms of fish miles away. Our spotter on land will use aggregations of soaring shearwater over a certain area, as the birds often feed on the exact same swarm of fish as dolphins do. While the poor fish were getting attacked from all angles, we were amazed by the spectacle of nature, seabirds soaring over our heads and acrobatic leaps from dolphins in between. We would have stayed longer, if it wasn’t for another phone call, notifying us about an even larger group of Atlantic spotted dolphins. These curious creatures surrounded our boat, there was certainly no one on board who hadn’t observed a number of spectacular high jumps by these charming dolphins and got back to the harbour full of gratitude.

By Sarah Kather

Sightings of the day

Click on each sighting to access the photo gallery of the correspondent trip

Ribeira Brava

09:30 Striped dolphins, Atlantic spotted dolphins