During the course of our flights this year, we didn't just see right whales.
The North Atlantic right whale calving ground off the coast of Georgia and northeast Florida was known to fisherman long before researchers discovered it. Historic whaling records show numerous mother and calf pairs hunted in the now critical habitat. In January 1935, local fisherman off the coast of St. Augustine, FL spotted and hunted a mother and calf. After a six-hour stand off, the calf's injuries proved too much and it succumbed to the trauma. The mother managed to elude the whalers, but suffered multiple gunshot wounds (read more about this story here). Following this event, a moratorium was put on hunting right whales in U.S. waters.
On a fly day, we get dressed in our flight suits, eat breakfast and pack a lunch in time to leave by 
During our flight, us aerial observers stare out the windows; focusing our eyes just under the horizon and scanning for whales. If we focused on the water closer to us, we would miss things that are farther away. During our flight we try so hard not to take our eyes off the water, it only takes a second to miss a whale! This season we have had some really far sightings (some 6 or 7 miles from our track line) and there have also been times on our survey line that we flew directly over whales. When we think we see a whale, we use our binoculars to verify and then we tell the pilots to either break track left or right, depending on which side of the plane the whale is on. Our primary responsibility is reporting these whales into the Early Warning System so we fly directly over the whales to get an exact position and closer look at each sighting to determine how many whales are there. Sometimes this is easy and in one pass we can determine the number and sometimes it takes a few passes, especially in the case of a Surface Active Group(SAG) where there may be a lot of rolling, and it can be difficult to figure out the exact number of whales right away. Each observer also has secondary roles; the observer on the right side will photograph whales, while the observer on the left side is responsible for taking data on each of the whales sighted. During each sighting this person is responsible for making sure there are no vessels posing an immediate threat to the whales, see Vessels use in the SEUS. Also this person is responsible for calling in our sightings to our ground contact via the satellite phone and also recording data on changing environmental conditions and anything else of interest during the flight.
In order to keep our eyes on the water as much as possible we take a position in the computer which is hooked up to the GPS using a mouse and then use a voice recorder, whose time is synced to the GPS time, to say what that data point is. At lunch we typically will switch seats so that we can face a different direction to stare out at the water (giving our necks a break) and also to share the different roles.
When our flight is over, our day isn't. When we get home we charge the satellite phone and camera battery, download images and review images and translate our voice recordings into our table with the GPS positions. We also write down a detailed summary of our day so that someone could look at the folder for the day and have a full idea of where we flew, what the weather was like, how many whales we saw, etc. We usually don't fully process our images, or do photo-analysis, on the days that we fly, because flying a full survey and processing just our data ends up being quite a full day. We will wait until a day where we are not flying or have a day off. 
In addition to the roles mentioned above, we have one more job role; many times when we are not in the air we are our team's Ground Contact. This person is responsible for knowing where the plane is at all times (we watch the plane on an Automated Flight Following program) and paging out sightings of whales when the plane calls in the sightings to the entire EWS system. The sighting come across on emails, pagers, and cell phones to a wide variety of entities in near-realtime in the following format : "29MAR2009, 11:09(L), 30 47.4N 081 13.6W, 1 ADULT, 1 CALF, HDG N" with the subject line giving relative distance to the nearest sea buoy. 
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Jess and Zach flew today and Kara and I went to meet them at the airport when they landed to refuel to take our annual team photo in front of the plane. Event though we all fly so much, it is very rare for us all to be at the airport at the same time. We made our photo shoot quick so Jess and Zach could get back in the air and find some whales. So far they have had 11 whale, including 3 mother and calf pairs. We are happy that we are still finding whales when we fly; but, there is only a few weeks left before we all head back north and none of us like the idea of leaving with the notion that there are still whales in the area.
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On March 6, a final disentanglement effort was launched to free Bridle (Eg#3311) from a severe entanglement in fishing gear (mentioned in this previous post). The effort was a novel and historic moment for researchers. It was the first time a large whale was successfully sedated in the wild. The disentanglement team was able to free 90% of the fishing line from Bridle. Science Daily published an amazing article that captures the essence of the efforts involved in this event. Below is the link to the article:
For the past three months, almost every time we have seen Eg #2413 she has been with Eg #1968 (Check them out in the Right Whale Catalog). When this season began, we observed a number of adult female pairs that later became some of this year's mothers. In December, when we started seeing these two, we thought that maybe they could be pregnant females.subscribe
As most every year, February was a busy month flying aerial surveys in the southeast US. Most of the moms have had their calves and typically males begin to show up in the region. In addition, we tend to see more social active groups (follow link to see footage from the Bay of Fundy) in February. With so many whales in the area, we were fortunate to have so many good weather days. Often we have to cancel or shorten a flight due to bad weather. However, we flew 20 of 28 days in February, of which 45 percent of the flights covered 100% of our survey area. Only 5 percent of the flights covered less than 50 percent of 
the survey area. We had a total of 216 sightings including 455 whales (most whales are re-sightings from previous days), with a season record of 49 whales in one day. We documented 5 new calves, and 1 entangled whale. We logged the longest flight days of the season with two 8.0 hr days. As much as I love sighting whales, I will be happy to see them start their migration north.subscribe
Today, NBC Nightly News ran a story on the North Atlantic right whale. The NBC team came to our field station to interview our team on February 13. They videotaped everything, from Jess answering a call on the survey plane relaying sighting information for right whales to Monica discussing the importance of the EWS aerial surveys. The NBC team also accompanied a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) disentanglement effort. They did a great job showing how so many forces need to come together for effort to be completed safely and successfully. Below are the two videos, TV and Extended, respectively.Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
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On February 26, we flew our normal survey area of 406 nm. We sighted 30 right whales and 1 humpback in our survey area. We saw a lot of whale behaviors typical for this area, SAGs, nursing and logging to name a few. One behavior that we saw I had never witness in the Southeast before; posturing.subscribe