WDCS Fieldwork Blog

..And so we turn our attention from the marine wildlife to the NATO exercise Joint Warrior that is now happening on our doorstep in the Moray Firth and in the homes of the whales.

The fog provides an opportunity to think more about the exercise, which under this name and others, including Joint Maritime Course – has happened in Scottish waters since 1946. That’s 60 years of ongoing exercising, repeatedly, two or three times a year.

The tranquil surroundings of the west coast have now returned. On Sunday we had a fleeting meeting from two sailors from HMCS Athabaskan of the Canadian Navy, shortly after which this Canadian warship that had been patrolling in our field survey area for days, finally disappeared. There are no more fighter jets overhead – usually by the time we find them they have already passed by and are circling over Skye – unless they come directly overhead, when there is no mistaking their whereabouts! Helicopters no longer buzz about between distant warships, continually on the move.

The amount of military activity in western Scotland has been considerable, and so the potential for lethal and sub-lethal impacts upon whale and dolphin populations in this region is high. Mitigation measures that are used on board naval ships are important, but they are also untested. They can not be guaranteed to protect marine wildlife from the repeated exercising, especially at night and in poor weather conditions – including sea fog, when seeing the nose in front of your face can be a problem!

Generally, communication is improving, dramatically. WDCS welcome the opportunity to sit around the table with the MoD, JNCC, SNH and other stakeholders to progress issues related to naval activities. But communication is only the first step! We need better conservation action. With this in mind, we recently wrote to the Secretary of State for Defence, Rt Hon Bob Ainsworth to ask him to:

? Conduct a full and transparent Environmental Impact Assessment of all of the activities that are undertaken on each of its exercise areas. The US Navy is currently in the process of conducting Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) for each of its ranges and we believe that the UK Ministry of Defence should do likewise. EIA is routinely conducted by all industries to assess environmental impacts in preparation for activities to be undertaken in the marine environment around the UK and elsewhere;

? Update the passive Sonar 2117 system to include consideration of behavioural as well as threshold shift and injury impacts, as developments in this field have been considerable; and disturbance is a legal issue in Scotland;

? Funding of long term, independent field research to determine population trends in naval exercise areas and to enable the full assessment of potential impacts.

Joint Warrior will return to Scotland in April and October in 2010… But this exercise isn’t over yet! And you can read more about our concerns here: www.wdcs.org.uk

If you are in the UK, or have access to the BBC output, you can see our colleague Sarah Dolman on the BBC One Show (9th October) talking about dolphins and the threats from oil and gas exploration. Have a look at about 9 minutes 30 seconds into the program.

The lilting and somewhat soporific voices of our constant companions the Stornoway Coastguard informed us – “Severe Gale Force 10 bearing west from south east Iceland” … “Severe Gale Force 10 bearing south from the Faroe Islands” – both heading straight for us to combine into what felt like a Gale Force 20! Was it some kind of co-incidence that this adverse weather was all being thrown at us from some of the nearby whaling nations?

However after several days of being blown off our feet (and paws!), we awoke to a picture of calm. All the islands were back in their rightful places and the Minch was laid out before us like an undulating velvet blanket.

And just in case it had escaped our notice that Joint Warrior was well and truly underway, there was a host of activity going on throughout our survey area. The Rona submarine range communicated over radio that they were to be “testing”, around the same time that our colleagues on HWDT’s research vessel, the Silurian, picked up sonar on their hydrophones. We had several fighter jets hurtling across the skies, pitching and rolling and generally going pretty fast and there were a selection of warships out patrolling the waters of the northern Minch!

The official NATO line is that this is “practice” for “eventualities” from terrorist threats and the like, but you’ve got to be a bit concerned when according to one of the American warships we overheard transmitting their position, despite being within sighting distance of our field station, had a navigator on board who seemed to think that they were somewhere off the south west coast of Ireland!! If these chaps can’t see the chart, lighthouses, landmasses or such like….how can they honestly tell us that they can see the whales?!! Not very comforting!

But back to the wildlife – much more interesting, especially today!!

We’ve mentioned the geese in an earlier blog where we decided that by the process of elimination we had to be seeing Canada Geese – oh how wrong were we? (Please remember … ornithologists we are not!) As it turns out they’re a mixture of barnacle and pink-footed geese, as the pictures below “kind of” show! Even if you’re not looking for them (and we’re not) you can’t fail to know that they’re flying overhead as they make one heck of a racket as they pass by – perhaps translated out of Goose language it means “are we almost there yet”?

During one of the early afternoon scans of our survey area with our “big-eyes” (high-powered binoculars) … the cry went up “ORCA” … about a mile off shore slicing through the water was a huge dorsal fin, without question that of a male orca! (Deliriously excited doesn’t even begin to tell you how we were feeling at this moment in time – after several days of not even being able to watch, we were now watching orca, who would ever have guessed!!) Then, shortly after, a second smaller fin appeared followed by a third even smaller one! The animals had come from the north and appeared to be slowly, languidly making their way southwest. Travelling through however didn’t seem to feature in their game plan and they had obviously found something that whetted their appetite as they spent the next hour and a half swimming backwards and forwards in front of the Shiants, surfacing anywhere between seconds and minutes apart. And then what should we see but a minke whale, surfacing mere metres from where we’d last seen the orca dive!! However as soon as we saw it, it was gone and it certainly didn’t hang around for long – although we did spot a minke to the south of our survey area moments later … perhaps he was concerned they’d turn out to be opportunistic feeders and decide he/she was looking like quite a tasty morsel themselves!

We watched these magnificent creatures for over an hour and a half, and even with the naked eye you couldn’t fail to spot the enormous dorsal fin of this giant of the seas – and the perfectly calm waters of the Minch certainly added to the ease by which they were seen!

There are researchers working to learn more about the orca found in UK waters and ideally we wanted to try and get them some information that would assist them in trying to identify these individuals. Through our “big-eyes” I could make out a small nick at the base of the fin, and when the animal was swimming towards us the fin was very obviously bent to the right in the middle portion and he had a very prominent saddle patch. All this information has been forwarded to the researchers working on these chaps to see if they can identify it from their photo-id catalogue – we’ll be sure to let you know as and when we hear more!

The very relaxed movements of the orca continued as they swam south through the Minch, directly in front of our field station and we eventually lost them as they moved off down the coast of Skye – hopefully to bring sheer joy to the next bunch of people who were lucky enough to catch sight of them.

The photographs below are certainly not of any great quality, and certainly wouldn’t enable photo-ID (which is why we spent so long looking through the big-eyes and taking down as much detail as we could) but we wanted to try and record this moment in some way, and of course to share it with others!!







Seeing killer whales off the coast of Scotland (and indeed the rest of the UK) is not a rarity and there have been many sightings in weeks, months and years gone by. However, for us it was special and a wonderful addition to our list of species so far encountered during our Joint Warrior field time!

Not much is known about the killer whales around the UK (apart from the work currently underway by the aforementioned researcher) but here’s a wee bit of background information for you …
Between 1938-1981 Norwegian whalers took 2,435 killer whales in the NE Atlantic – no small number! Additionally, during this time the culling of killer whales was carried out by the US navy on behalf of the Icelandic government and further takes from Icelandic waters were permitted by the live-capture industry for the aquariums. Thankfully, they are no longer hunted (directly at least), however a more pressing issue for them in this day and age would be a lack of available prey.

So how was it for us? We were lost for words…! It was a spectacular sighting in spectacular conditions and we felt honoured to have borne witness to such an amazing sight. The beauty of the natural world never fails to amaze!

Now … some of the more observant members of this blog reading community may have noticed that contrary to the title of this blog entry, warships came first and the orca came last (the geese however stayed in the same place so it wasn’t all under false pretences) … well, that was a little ruse of ours to ensure that you read the whole way through … and it worked did it not?!!

Well now…we’ve had a bit of a tempestuous time of it of late…Gale Force 10 winds or whatever that translates to - from my point of view it translates to me almost being blown off my four paws! There’s been horizontal rain, the waterfall in the vicinity has been flowing the wrong way, the sheep have been hiding and getting anywhere, except the garden, has proved to be a bit of a risky strategy – thus not much outdoor activity for any of us! Although the activity that we have had has been amusing with human Nicola falling in the burn (but full points for saving the camera) and human Sarah looking like she’s entering some balance beam gymnastics competition!





Although almost as quickly as it arrived, the storm passed and it was back to business as usual, although as you can see from my photo above I’m not quite as focused as I should be – apparently! But I’ve been thinking as opposed to acting and I have a question for you all…

Why do they call a group of birds resting on the water a “hurry”? They don’t look in much of a hurry to me!! How about calling them a “bunch of lazy birds sitting on the water”?

And I have a piece of trivia for you all too – Did you know that the average length of a harbour porpoise (1.8 – 2m) is the same as the average width of a gannet’s wingspan?! Amazing what goes on in the mind of a dog isn’t it?!!

According to my humans there are quite a few of them minke whale things still around, a few harbour porpoises and some ducks – yum … any orange sauce? (Actually, they’re eider ducks so not only could I eat something delicious but I could have a nice new pillow too – a duck with a dual purpose, that’s what I like to see!)

From my point of view, there are also still lots of them sheep things around, and they’re bigger now so – fair game? I happened to hear on that television thing the other night, on a programme called “Countryfile” I think it was, that farmers believe that sheep are always trying to come up with a new way to kill themselves … well hello!! Death at the hands of a canine researcher? It would certainly be novel!



And so until the next time, I’m off to bark at the moon … well, it’s a full one after all!

Up to 20 ships, 4 submarines and 40 aircraft will be exercising as part of Joint Warrior - we’ve already had a close encounter with 2 of them, as 2 fighter jets flew at low range over the top of us this week!

The exercise kicks off on Monday and lasts for several weeks. It may be operation as normal on the west coast of Scotland (we understand that exercising of this sort has been going on for many decades) but part of the exercise – including active sonar - will also occur in the Moray Firth.

As far as we know, this is the first time Joint Warrior has occurred in the Moray Firth since the bottlenose dolphin Special Area of Conservation (SAC) was designated in 2005. However…the bottlenose dolphin Management Plan that has just been released by the SAC Management Group doesn’t even consider NATO exercises, including sonar – let alone Joint Warrior, the largest military exercise in Europe.)



WDCS is involved in intensive dialogue with UK government agencies – MoD (Ministry of Defence), JNCC (Joint Nature Conservation Committee) and SNH (Scottish Natural Heritage) – as well as with those scientists and volunteers who conduct boat-based and land-based observations around the coastline, as the exercise kicks off.



The UK MoD have committed to undertake some general management measures in the Moray Firth, including remaining 30 nm from the dolphin SAC and 10 nm from the Southern Trench (a minke whale hot spot). They will be conducting the following mitigation measures to protect the bottlenose dolphins: only using sonar from one ship at a time, use of marine mammal observers, passive acoustic monitoring and soft-starts (ramping up the sonar to its maximum level), as well as avoidance and shut-down procedures.

Let’s hope the severe gale force storm that we are experiencing has passed before the exercise starts. The chance of seeing any whales and dolphins in the current extreme weather conditions is almost nil and so some of above mitigation measure useless.



The UK’s nature conservation agency (JNCC) has advised that with these measures in place, there will not be a significant impact on the dolphins. Let’s hope they are right.

Countries involved in this exercise include Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, US and the whole thing is led by the UK. We don’t currently know if all countries have to apply these measures. We hope they do.

But we don’t think they go far enough. We continue to believe that the MoD should conduct a full and transparent environmental impact assessment of all the activities that take place as part of its exercises around the UK.