Cape Cod Day 5 - Bayside Talk (8/16)

After dinner on Wednesday we headed over to Wellfleet Bay to listen to the Bayside talk. The sanctuary brings in a new speaker every week to talk about a nature related subject. We try to attend at least one talk each vacation. In the past we've seen presentations on coyotes, horseshoe crabs, etc.

This week's talk was by Tim Voorhais of Gulf of Maine Productions. Tim works as a spotter pilot. He flies a small aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean looking for schools of fish. He also works with representatives of the the Div. of Marine Fisheries on a Basking Shark research program. Tim explained that he locates the sharks and then radios their locations to a boat which tags the animals.

In addition to this work, Tim has taken up digital photography and has taken some unbelievable shots of the animals living off of Cape Cod. His images are truly stunning in that they give you a vastly different view of these great animals than the typical naturalist gets from a whale watch boat.

Tim's talk was filled with great stories but the most riveting one was about a pod of Orcas which he found attempting to prey on a Right Whale calf in 2005. Tim explained that the smaller whales tried for several hours to separate the calf from its mother but, in the end, they were unsuccessful. Orcas are particularly rare in the Northeast so his pictures were critical to documenting this event.

Tim also presented a slideshow of his images and commented on the state of our neck of the Atlantic Ocean. Here are some of the interesting observations that stuck in my mind:

1. Most of the large Bluefin Tuna are gone but smaller ones (40 lb range) are plentiful.
2. The population of Bluefish has exploded.
3. So has the population of Gray Seals (Tim wondered, as I have, how long before the large sharks follow this food source to the Cape)
4. Smelts have been overfished.

This is some informed insight on the status of our fisheries. Hopefully Tim will continue his work and will get the opportunity to work closer with our government agencies to document population growth or decline.