On Sunday at a lobster bake and art show in Northport’s Bayside enclave, more than a hundred people were treated to a special show: a humpback whale swimming back and forth just offshore for an hour.
It was one of dozens of close-to-shore humpback sightings in Penobscot Bay that have been a source of wonder and delight for Mainers and visitors over the last month.
“It’s really exciting to share the same space with something as legendary and mythical and majestic as a humpback whale,” said Michelle Zagardo, who lives in Bethel and is vacationing in Bayside, where she saw the whale Sunday.
Whales are commonly found in Maine waters, but typically are seen farther offshore, by fishermen or by passengers on whale watch tours.
Lois Grover of Searsmont saw plenty of whales when she was working as a sternman on lobster boats. But she had never seen a whale from shore until Thursday at Belfast City Park.
“I was just in my car,” she said. “And I saw something jump and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, it’s the whale!’”
The past month of whale activity “certainly seems more prolonged than we’ve seen in the past,” said Tanya Lubansky, the director of photo-identification research at Allied Whale.
There is more than one whale present in the bay, she said, and there have been at least two reported sightings of a mother-calf pair.
Based on their size, most of the whales being spotted in the bay are likely juveniles, Lubansky said.
The sightings in Penobscot Bay are part of a larger phenomenon of inshore humpback sightings from New York to the Bay of Fundy, said Jooke Robbins, who directs the Humpback Whale Studies Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
It all boils down to one thing, she said: food.
“That’s pretty much what drives everything,” she said.
The whales are feeding on large schools of menhaden, better known as pogies.
While whale researchers keep a catalog of more than 13,000 individually identified humpbacks from across the Atlantic, it’s been challenging to identify the whales in Penobscot Bay, Lubansky said.
Humpbacks are primarily identified by the patterns on their tail flukes. But because the water in Penobscot Bay is relatively shallow and the whales are feeding on schools of fish close to the surface, they often aren’t diving deep enough to show their flukes, Lubansky said. Researchers are working to build a local catalog of dorsal fins to try to estimate how many whales are in the bay and to identify them.
While seeing whales close to shore has been a thrill for humans, it can also be risky for the whales, Lubansky cautioned.
“As whale distribution shifts closer to shore, interactions with people inevitably increase, creating risks for both whales and boaters,” she said.
Two dead whales have been reported in the area over the last three weeks, Lubansky said. One was a fin whale found south of Stonington that looked like it had been dead for some time. The second was a humpback named Bowling who had been seen alive several times earlier this season before his carcass was spotted off Petit Manan island, Lubansky said.
Neither whale’s cause of death is known.
Robbins said there have been a number of incidents of whales being struck by boats or having problems with fishing gear along the East Coast this summer. The number of incidents is proportional with the number of whales close to shore, she said.
“It really does come down to just a lot of humans overlapping with whales,” she said.
But humans can make that overlap safer by slowing their boats down and giving whales even more space than they might think they should, she said. And watching from shore is the safest option, she said.
Lubansky said that images on social media have shown boats getting very close to humpbacks while they are feeding. In Bayside on Sunday, Zagardo also saw boats getting too close to the whales.
In July, the Maine Department of Marine Resources reminded fishermen and boaters to keep a distance of at least 100 feet, and preferably 300 feet. The agency also urged people operating boats in areas where whales may be present to slow their speed to 10 knots and avoid fishing near whales.
Whales are protected by the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, which makes it illegal to harm, injure, chase, kill or harass whales, or any other marine mammal, such as seals or porpoises. Harassment, the agency said, includes “any activity that results in changes to the whales’ natural behaviors, such as feeding.” Violations can result in fines of up to $35,000 and up to one year in prison.
As much as Zagardo loved seeing the whale in Bayside, the encounter raised “unnerving” questions. “What is pushing them here and why aren’t they further out?” she said. “And how do we share the space respectfully and make sure their space is preserved?”
Seeing the whales was a reminder that humans share this world, she said.
On Monday, Zagardo was back at the shore with her family scanning the horizon, hoping to catch another glimpse of the whale. The whale was nowhere to be seen, but a loon was fishing among the boat moorings and five porpoises made a brief appearance farther out. Zagardo gestured at the water that was steely gray under a light rain.
“This is a wilderness right there,” she said.