Peales dolphins

I’ve just come back from a few weeks on a squid trawler. We were fishing near Beauchene for a lot of the time, which is an island to the south of the main groups of the Falkland Islands although it’s still part of the Falklands. It’s uninhabited and is a wildlife sanctuary with visits being strictly controlled. Fishing around this area brings lots of birds to the boat (more on those later) due to the large breeding colonies.

For two days we had peales dolphins around our boat. On the first day they came and visited up for a few hours but on the second day they followed us all afternoon and into the evening. The numbers grew from about 10 on the first day to at least 20 on the second day.

The number wasn’t the only thing that was surprising – their behaviour was incredible. They were highly active, jumping out of the water repetitively (I counted one jumping 35 times and it had already jumped at least 10 times before I started counting!); swimming upside down and slapping their tail fin in the water; swimming around each other and jumping out of the water and twisting around in the air. I’ve never seen dolphins so active, and certainly never knew they could be so active for so long. I don’t know why they were so active, the way they swam so close to each other on occasion made me wonder if it was mating time. I still haven’t checked that out though. It may just have been that with all that squid in the water they were well fed and wanted to play.

Anyway, here are some photos:







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