About half an hour into our trip, our cliff-spotter called in an exciting sighting. He'd picked up a pod of Blainville's beaked whales to our east, a rarely seen species in this region. The beaked whales are deep-diving specialists, often feeding in excess of 1000m where they use their distinctive shaped mouths to suction-feed on squid. Another species, the Cuvier's beaked whale, recently dethroned the sperm whale as the deepest diving mammal in the world, with a dive of almost 3000m and deep dives lasting nearly 4 hours. This is a staggering feat of physiology that we still don't fully understand.
The problem with these deeper diving species, is that once they dive, they can be gone for a considerable amount of time! The plus side is that when they do return to the surface, they appear to spend a while recovering before their next dive, meaning that they can be spotted. Our challenge was that we had no idea how long they'd be down for. After 45 minutes, it wasn't looking promising. However, after an hour of waiting, we finally spotted the pod of around 10 individuals taking shallow breaths and offering us the chance to observe them in more detail.
Watching them through my Zeiss Terra ED 10x32 binoculars, a powerful lightweight binocular for this sort of work, I was able to get clear views of the tusked bull, covered in scars. His harem of cows and youngsters had various distinctive markings. If you do see Blainville's in the region, I'd be fascinated to know if any correlate with the pictures below. One of the younger animals had a row of white barnacles behind its dorsal fin that I've highlighted in the picture below.
These were the only cetacean we saw on the trip, but considering this species is only seen on 2% of cetacean tours from Madeira we were particularly lucky to encounter them.