Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 34

To have a chance of seeing the Southwest’s largest creatures, you’ll need to get in a boat. Colonies of grey seals inhabit many offshore islands, including Mousehole Rock and the Isles of Scilly, where you’ll find them in their greatest numbers. A trip through local waters may also give you the chance of seeing them in the water, bobbing their heads above the surface to watch you pass. Groups of dolphins and porpoises can also be encountered in the English Channel, although numbers have greatly decreased over the past century owing to overfishing – this has not only depleted the stocks on which the animals feed, but has also caused innumerable deaths through dolphins inadvertently getting tangled up in fishing nets. It’s too early to tell yet whether the EU’s ban on drift nets (the ‘walls of death’) has allowed the populations to recover.

Moving down the likelihood-of-spotting scale, whales, including minke, humpback and even killer whales, are sometimes spotted in the waters around the Isles of Scilly, as are migrating leatherback turtles on their vast journeys across the oceans back to their breeding grounds in the tropics. One species whose numbers actually seem to be increasing – and which you have a reasonable chance of spotting during the summer months – are basking sharks, the world’s second largest fish, who visit the area in summer to feed on vast swarms of seasonal plankton. Though measuring up to 40ft long, the sharks are completely harmless to humans (though deadly to plankton).