Cruise to Eastern States and Canada Sept 18th-Oct 10th 2015.

Continuing with the highlights-

2. Blue Whale.

It wasn't the greatest view in the world but seeing the biggest animal on the planet has got to be up there. On October 4th we were in the outer reaches of the St Lawrence River on the return journey from a stop in Quebec. This area is well known for attracting a variety of cetaceans including Belugas which I'd dipped on during the inbound journey to Quebec (I was on the wrong side of the Ship, but you can't win them all). Where the Saguenay Fjord meets the St Lawrence River at Tadoussac was an area specifically mentioned for Blue Whale in the autumn, I'm not sure exactly where we were at this point but it certainly would not have been a million miles from here.
It was around sunrise, I'd not been out on deck long when I saw a huge spout go up. I'd already seen a few Humbacks on the trip and instantly this blow looked different; a tall slender column in comparison to Humbacks bushier blow. Through the bins I got views of parts of the animal including a long portion of body with a tiny stubby dorsal fin, then more extremely impressive blows before the ship had passed on by. I tried firing off a few shots with the DSLR but with the low light levels and distance involved the best I could manage was the heavily cropped image below.

3-Snow Geese

Before the trip I had done some homework but I hadn't picked up on the fact that the St Lawrence River is extremely important as a staging area for an exceptional number of  Snow Geese in both spring and autumn (700,000-800,000 birds). I also hadn't appreciated that this population winters along the eastern seaboard of the states from the Carolinas up to New England (Always had the nature documentary images of other populations wintering in New Mexico in my mind).
On Oct 2nd as we were on the inbound journey to Quebec, I was on the port side when someone came up to me to tell me that there was a huge flock of white birds on the starboard side. Scurried round and was met with an awesome sight, the biggest flock of birds I've ever seen. They were distant but I could clearly see they were Snow Geese, with the naked eye it looked as though the shoreline was made up of a white sand beach. They were just too far and the ship moving too quickly to make any sort of proper attempt at estimating numbers. I tried taking photo's and blowing them up to get an estimate but this didn't work due to the distance involved with the adjusted pics becoming a pix- elated mass. As a bonus a few small flocks came closer and passed in front of the ship.