Gulls wheeling and crying over the water are usually a sign of something interesting happening, and a cause to stop and watch. Yesterday half a dozen small gulls seemed to be concentrating on a point in the water off Kilchoan Bay where something, perhaps a seal, was surfacing and then sinking.
Under this sort of onslaught, a seal would have dived and moved away. More, the object of the gulls' attacks was too large to be a seal's head. Black, rounded, shiny, it seemed to have a neutral buoyancy.
After a few minutes it sank and stayed down. The gulls lost interest. We walked on. Then, this morning, Kilchoan Early Bird reported finding strips of what he was fairly certain to be whale meat, perhaps cut with a serrated knife.
He tells me that whale meat is carried, legally, on Norwegian trawlers. Is this from one of them? Is it connected to the floating object? Perhaps we'll walk round the back of Kilchoan Bay tomorrow to see if anything has been washed up.
Many thanks to Kilchoan Early Bird for the picture.
Shame, shame, shame on the Norwegians and the Japanese. So many marine mammals are endangered; there is no excuse to kill and eat them!
ReplyDeleteCould it have been a propeller strike?
ReplyDeleteVery possible. It would explain why there are bits of the animal's remains floating around the place. Jon
ReplyDelete