Short-finned Pilot Whales - Madeira

Short-finned Pilot Whales - Madeira

17 September 2013 - Madeira (Atlantic Ocean)

I decided to do a Whale, dolphin and bird watching excursion by boat with Madeira Wind Birds. It was great!
We spotted several Short-finned Pilot Whales / Indische Grienden (Globicephala macrorhynchus). They are in the same family (Delphinidae) as Bottlenose Dolphins - we encountered them earlier on.

The 'best' footage is at the end. It's quite hard to get some stable video images with an SLR camera with video function. Especially if the boat is rocking and you use your 150-500mm zoom lens to shoot it. Usually you are to late with pointing your camera when a pilot whale breaks the surface. They just touch the surface for a second and dive under again.

So. I did my best. I hope you enjoy it!
(if you have any trouble watching the Flickr video - better quality than YouTube - you can watch it on YouTube as well)

For those who like the biological details:
Click a link and you'll go to the page for that rank in the biological classification on Schaapmans' Wildlife Spotting.

Kingdom:	Animalia
	Animals	Dierenrijk
Phylum:	Chordata
	Vertebrates	Gewervelden
Class:	Mammalia
	Mammals	Zoogdieren
Order:	Cetacea
	Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises	Walvisachtigen
Suborder:	Odontoceti
	Toothed Whales	Tandwalvissen
Superfamily:	Delphinoidea
	Toothed Whales	Tandwalvissen
Family:	Delphinidae
	Oceanic Dolphins	Dolfijnen
Genus:	Globicephala
	Pilot Whales	Grienden
Species:	Globicephala macrorhynchus
	Short-finned Pilot Whale	Indische Griend

Upcoming: new site www.wildlifespotting.com

You might have noticed that the domain of this blog has changed. It is no longer 'blogspot.com', but it changed to blog.wildlifespotting.com. I've been working on my new website, www.wildlifespotting.com this year - and it stalled a bit the last few months due to other priorities - so soon you'll see all my wildlife photos there. The photos are organized by their taxonomy; you can see all photos per class (e.g. Mammals), order (e.g. Lepidoptera or Butterflies), by family, genus, species and so forth. It's quite some work to get it technically done, since the complete biological classification (the taxonomic tree of related animals) is also visually represented. It will be cool - at least to me - to have all the photos organized and displayed in their context. And on top of that: the entire site will be made 'fluid' and with 'responsive design'. That means that you can easily go through the site on your laptop, big screen pc, tablet or smartphone without any problems of display. The photos and info are displayed differently and for mobile phones the amount of data you will have to load will be limited. So, keep an eye out for this new site!