Jumping whales stop traffic

If you have been driving in and out of Tórshavn in the past days, you will have noticed long rows of cars at the side of the road by the Kaldbaksfjørður inlet.

The reason? People have been fascinated by three bottlenose whales that have been playing around in the water and jumping up in the air.

doglingar_2.jpg

Due to complications with the video upload function, the above photo will have to do for now. Unfortunately, no photo of the jumping whales is available.

A brief visit

“Seeing this group of bottlenose whales near land in the Faroes is perhaps an indication that we should expect to see more large whales swimming between our islands,” says Bjarni Mikkelsen, a biologist at Havstovan, the Faroe Marine Research Institute.

“We have seen small groups of these whales near land in previous summers. They tend to stay here for a few days and then they leave.”

He does not know exactly why the whales come so close to land.

“I’m guessing that either they are looking for food that is not available in deep waters, or perhaps they simply want to play around in shallow waters for a while.”

Response to international media coverage about whaling

Regarding whale hunting, there is a reason why we don’t write about it on our English site: it would inevitably lead to bad Facebook comments from anti-whaling activists abroad.

The ‘Faroese News in English’ Facebook page was set up after enquiries from the Faroese immigrant community saying that the English news site was difficult to find, and also to provide a platform for immigrants to express their views on current affairs in the Faroes. It is not intended as a forum for anti-whaling activists.

The Faroese government recently issued a statement in English about whaling in the wake of a much-publicised whale drive in Tórshavn earlier this month.

Read the Faroese version of this article here.

English version: Dann Vinther

More Faroese News in English.