From the corner of my eye I caught some movement not too far away and heard a loud slap as I turned toward the disturbance. There was white water thrown into the air, but not the mist normally accompanying a surfacing whale.<\/p>\n
Then up rose the magnificent fluke of a humpback whale. It lingered high above the water for a moment or two before coming back down again with an almighty slap, sending sea spray everywhere.<\/p>\n
I watched for a few moments, just taking in the spectacle, as the whale flapped and slapped some more, not thinking I had time for any photos. I was expecting this wonderful display to be brief, but a minute later the exhibition continued. Out came my camera and I got plenty more flaps and slaps before the whale gave one last slap, proceeded to roll around on its back for a while, then descended below the surface.<\/p>\n
A moment later the whale broke the surface with that familiar plume of exhaled mist before heading off on its way.<\/p>\n
There are all sorts of reasons why humpback whales slap their flukes, but this time around I am sure it was just for the fun of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the corner of my eye I caught some movement not too far away and heard a loud slap as I turned toward the disturbance. There was white water thrown into the air, but not the mist normally accompanying a surfacing whale. Then up rose the magnificent fluke of a humpback whale. It lingered high […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1155,2390,3363,2380,2389,3367,1638],"class_list":["post-9717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-animalbehaviour","tag-humpbackwhale","tag-marinemammals","tag-norway","tag-skjervoy","tag-tailflap","tag-whale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9719,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717\/revisions\/9719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}