Bird Island is one of two year-round stations on South Georgia, conducting valuable bird and seal studies along with opportunistic whale sightings. Project Partner and Bird Island Station Science manager Ash Bennison has been working on the Bird Island Whale Sightings Protocol. The zoological field assistants (ZFAs) who spend over a year on Bird Island survey from land when time and weather allows. One of the goals of the Sustained Monitoring projects is to set up a whale sightings protocol to increase whale data collection on Bird Island. It outlines the purpose and objectives, includes equipment lists, observation requirements and procedures, and the type of data to record. You can view our protocol here
Bird Island Whale Sightings Chart
The zoological field assistants on Bird Island collect opportunistic sightings of whales from the shoreline. They collect data throughout the year and this has led to the first confirmed resighting match to South Georgia of a Southern right whale.
This chart shows the monthly abundance of cetacean species seen from Bird Island, South Georgia between September 2024 and March 2025. Abundance is presented on a log scale (each step on the axis represents a 10-fold increase in abundance) so that temporal trends among all species can be interpreted.