The guide with Molly Bawn Whale and Puffin Tour in Mobile has conducted numerous interviews on what she saw off the Southern Shore Thursday, but the story doesn’t get old for the German biologist here on a work visa.
“It was awesome,” she said Monday.
“I never expected to see a thing like that. I was hoping to see orcas, but that was way more exciting.”
Late last Thursday afternoon, Winkel’s boss, Mike Shortall, called to say a giant pod of killer whales were spotted heading in their direction.
Excited — she’d seen countless whales over the summer, but no orcas — she and a group headed out.
Things were pretty quiet for a while, until a small porpoise sped past.
“He was really freaked and swimming very fast and almost hit our boat because he was so panicked,” Winkel recalls.
“I was thinking, ‘There’s possibly something bigger coming.’”
Her hunch was right.
A couple of minutes later, the dorsel fin of an orca appeared. Before long, 15 or so were visible, and travelling very fast.
That fascinating sight would get even more spectacular.
“Then, suddenly, they started splashing around and jumping out of the water, breaching, slapping their tails. We had no idea what was going on. We thought maybe they were just playful or whatever.
“Then they just stopped. ... We moved closer to see what was going on and then I noticed they had a minke whale in between them."
The orcas were preparing to prey, swimming beside the minke and surrounding it so it couldn’t escape.
“Soon after this, they started biting pieces out of it. They bit off half of its tail to prevent him from swimming away. They were also trying to push him beneath the surface to stop him from trying to take a breath, to drown him. Of course, he was desperate and trying to get away.”
She says that at first the tour-takers didn’t grasp what was happening, saying things like, “Oh orcas are cute, we saw them at Sea World.
“I said, ‘Oh, I don’t think you saw this at Sea World ... We just continued watching them. We didn’t have to talk becausewe were so fascinated by what was going on out there. Then they noticed there was blood in the water and they were asking me about it.”
Winkel says people were shocked but fascinated.
“I told them it’s just part of nature and it’s such a rare sighting that they should feel privilege to be able to observe this.”
She says they watched the orcas for over an hour, when the Molly Bawn had to return to take out another group.
When they left, the victim was still alive, but weakening. The next tour returned to find the minke — which is generally slightly bigger than an individual orca — gone.
“Then, suddenly, they started splashing around and jumping out of the water, breaching, slapping their tails. We had no idea what was going on. We thought maybe they were just playful or whatever." - Jeannine Winkel
“Then we watched them feeding on the pieces of (minke) whale meat and all the gulls would go crazy, trying to get their piece,” Winkel says.
“They were just crazy, the orcas.”
Dr. Jack Lawson wishes he saw it.
The research scientist with Fisheries and Ocean’s marine mammal section says there are only a six or seven recorded sightings of orcas attacking a minke off the province’s shores.
And those are over a long period of time, he notes.
“It’s relatively rare to see this event,” Lawson says, noting it’s estimated there a few hundred orcas in Atlantic Canada.
“That’s equal to the number in British Columbia,” he elaborates, “but they are spread in a huge area so the chance of sighting a group is rare.”
Lawson says Thursday’s incident, and the images from it, should aid in the understanding of orcas around the island, as there hasn’t been a lot of research done on them.
In British Columbia, he explains, it’s known there are different types — resident orcas who eat fish, transients that mainly eat mammals, and offshore orcas that appear to be shark specialists.
Nothing like that is known about the whales here, he says.
“It could be that this is the one place in the world where killer whales eat mammals and fish. We don’t know. That’s one of the things we could learn if people keep sending us stuff like this.”
Lawson says the images and video footage collected during Thursday’s attack will be given to grad student Tara Stevens, who is studying the province’s killer whales and how they influence the ecosystem.
She has started a catalogue of images and will try to match orcas in last week’s encounter with ones in the database.
“At least three of the individuals have been seen before,” Lawson says. “They’re in our catalogue. And I believe the male in the group — the one with the largest dorsel fin — was one that we had seen before that had been eating white-beaked dolphins.”
The Molly Bawn tour has gotten numerous calls since the incident.
“A lot of people have been calling up and asking to go out,” says Jane Shortall, owner of the boat tour.
Winkel wants to keep going out, too.
So much so, she’s hoping to renew her visa so she can return in 2011.
sbartlett@thetelegram.com
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I'm from CornerBrook and myself and my mother also witnessed the Orcas when they were in Benoits cove and even caught them on video, my mother gave the video to a friend, who had a friend that worked at the University at the time who confirmed that this was a family of Orcas. Unfortunately we didn't recieve the video back but the memories of the sighting we still talk about together in amazement and what an amazing sight we were privilaged to get to see :)