The Giants Return

Three people had a shot at my WIIW this week.

Marcy guessed:  “I think it may be the splash of a large mammal like a whale or dolphin.”

Bingo you are right on the money 100%.

Linda G adopted a barrack room lawyer approach with: “This week's WIIW is easy-peasy: water.”

Well you aren’t wrong, it is water so I guess that earns a good 80%.

Linda was with Marcy: “Gracious, how in the world did you learn how to do all of these things? For a guy from the city, you've become remarkably self-sufficient in the wild!
Whale tail hitting the water?”

Although my most recent incarnation has been as a city slicker, I am in fact a country boy from way back, and a bit of a “Jack of all trades”.

And yes the WIIW is a splash from a whale’s tail hitting water.

I shot this a few weeks ago at Yamba, not a great shot because the animal was so far off shore but I couldn’t help myself.

This was one of a dozen or so Humpback whales we saw breaching that afternoon. When I was in my late teens you would only see the occasional whale migrating along the shore to their winter breeding grounds at Harvey Bay in Queensland (or on their way back to Antarctic waters in summer). 

But since the introduction of the international whaling moratorium in 1982 the Humpback population seems to be climbing back from the brink. So now an hour or two on a headland will usually reward you with the sighting of several of these wonderful creatures at this time of year.

Now to a closer encounter, I caught this Brown Falcon (Falco berigora) on the way down our track on Friday.

She was positively camera friendly, posing front-on

 

Before showing me her “better side”

 

Finally she bobbed her head at me and shot off through the trees.