Social media was buzzing yesterday when reports of Britain’s second ever bowhead whale sighting were broadcast over Facebook.

The unidentified animal was seen close to shore at Marazion, near Penzance, in Cornwall, by regular marine mammal observer and medic, Dave Jarvis of BDMLR. Local boat operators, Marine Discovery Penzance, were on hand to go to sea and check out the report, and after initial thoughts that it might be a humpback whale, on-board whale researcher Marijke De Boer suspected that the animal was in fact a bowhead whale, making only its second appearance in UK waters in modern times.

With excellent images having been widely circulated, Sea Watch Foundation were able to add to the confirmation that this Mount’s Bay animal was indeed a bowhead whale and a very significant sighting indeed! The first sighting of this species was just last year when a mystery whale was sighted off the Isles of Scilly.

Bowheads normally live in the high arctic. Heavily exploited by whalers in the Arctic Ocean, in Baffin Bay off Greenland, and the Barents Sea north of Norway, the population seriously declined during the early twentieth century. Numbers globally have increased to somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000, mainly in the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Ocean.