There are about 370 North Atlantic right whales left in the world \u2014\u00a0and a Newfoundland man spotted one off the southern Avalon Peninsula earlier this month.<\/p>\n
Tour guide Jared Clarke was taking a group bird watching off St. Shott’s when he noticed a whale surfacing out of the corner of his eye.<\/p>\n
Spotting a whale isn’t unusual for Clarke, but then he noticed something odd.<\/p>\n
The whale’s head was covered in callosities,\u00a0“these big rough patches,” Clarke told CBC Radio’s The Broadcast.<\/p>\n
When he saw the creature’s back, Clarke noticed it didn’t have a dorsal fin and that’s when it clicked.<\/p>\n
“I think the group thought I might have lost it. I sort of screamed, ‘That’s a right whale!,'” he said. “I was out of my skin excited.”<\/p>\n
North Atlantic right whales are an endangered species, with only 366 left in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Clarke, who runs Bird The Rock tours, was thrilled to share the right whale with his tour group. They saw it surface a few times, and at one point it “kind of waved” with its flipper.<\/p>\n
The man has heard of just a few sightings of the endangered mammal around Newfoundland, and has always dreamed of seeing one for himself.<\/p>\n
He ran for his camera and snapped a few photos, which he passed on to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been waiting for years to see a right whale in Newfoundland waters,” said Clarke, who saw one before in the Bay of Fundy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He noted there was an indentation on the whale’s head that he’s been told looks like a rope scar, meaning the animal had been entangled in fishing gear at one point.<\/p>\n
Jack Lawson, a marine mammal researcher with DFO, said the sighting is “exciting and horrifying at the same time.”<\/p>\n
Seeing these whales could require shutting down fishing, Lawson said\u00a0\u2014 but only if three whales are spotted together, or its a mother and calf.<\/p>\n
Clarke urges everyone to look out for right whales.<\/p>\n
“They can show up anywhere,” Clarke said. “If you’re out there whale watching, keep an eye out for something that just looks a little different.”<\/p>\n
Download our\u00a0free CBC News app<\/a>\u00a0to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our\u00a0daily headlines newsletter here<\/a>. Click\u00a0here to visit our landing page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are about 370 North Atlantic right whales left in the world \u2014\u00a0and a Newfoundland man spotted one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-7726","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}