Another Irrawaddy dolphin breach

A couple of days ago I said that I’d only seen an Irrawaddy dolphin breach on three occasions. Make that four. I when out to Santubong with some friends from Kuching and KL on Easter Friday. Good trip, we saw four groups in total. The first group only consisted of two dolphins and we spotted them in the Santubong River itself, right near the Santubong bridge. They were light grey in colour. So just 1 minute into the trip and we saw dolphins. Not a bad start to the day.

We spotted the other groups in Santubong and Salak, all of them were dark grey/black. The different groups were dispersed around the estuary and did not come together as they did on Tuesday’s kayaking trip. Best of all we saw an Irrawaddy jump out of the water right in front of us, great little leap. It was not quite a full breach, more of a half-breach but most of us on the boat managed to see it.

Again the leap happened after the group we were watching had spent some time on the surface socialising and splashing around together. We spent an hour or so with the dolphins and then went wildlife watching in the Kuching Wetlands National Park.

We went on CPH Travels ‘Santubong Wildlife Tour’ and were not disappointed. Thanks to our guide Jamadi’s excellent skills at spotting wildlife we saw dolphins, long-tailed macaques, proboscis monkeys, silver-leaf monkeys, a stork billed kingfisher, fireflies and crocodiles. I’ll post on this another day.

A full breach by the world's most chilled out dolphin

I don’t know what this dolphin had for lunch! The picture shows that the most inactive dolphins in the world do sometimes put on energetic displays. Here an Irrawaddy dolphin performs a full breach, jumping clear out of the water. The picture captures the early part of the jump. The photo was taken in the Santubong River estuary on 5th June 2001. At the time we were conducting a dolphin survey. I’ve only seen this breaching behaviour three times in the 6 years that I have been going out dolphin watching near Kuching.

On that day we were watching a group of dolphins that had come together on the surface. They were splashing around, slapping their fins at each and generally seemed to be enjoying themselves. I don’t know what they were doing – playing, mating - who knows. They were on the surface for about 20 minutes, then the main group slowly moved off and suddenly a dolphin jumped out of the water right near the boat. I have not seen another photo of an Irrawaddy dolphin breaching in the wild. So, thanks Stuart for allowing me to post it here.