Our commitment to conservation

Thanks to our travellers, we have now been able to collect survey data on whales, dolphins, porpoises, Basking Sharks, Ocean Sunfish and turtles in the Bay of Biscay and English Channel for twelve consecutive years. To date, our surveys have covered a total distance of over 120,000 km of transects in the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel. Since 1996, the popularity of our holidays have enabled us to conduct more surveys than ever before - which has meant encountering in excess of 135,000 cetaceans of 20 species!

Our observations have revealed just how important the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel are for feeding, breeding, calving and migrating cetaceans. Indeed, we have discovered important populations of several potentially threatened species, such as Harbour Porpoise, Common Dolphin and Basking Shark.

As a result of our surveys and research, the Bay of Biscay is also becoming renowned as one of the most important regions in the world for members of the mysterious and poorly understood beaked whale family. Four species are now known to occur in the region, with the True's Beaked Whale the most recent to be discovered. True's Beaked Whales are among the rarest of all cetaceans - previous knowledge was based on a mere handful of stranded individuals and two probable sightings. But in July 2001 and August 2003 we photographed breaching individuals. These encounters constituted the first and second confirmed sightings in the world of this species at sea! We have also been fortunate enough to encounter pods of Sowerby's Beaked Whales - only a handful of at-sea sightings exist of this very poorly know denizen of the deep.

All of our survey records collected during our holidays are submitted to ORCA - Organisation Cetacea. The Company of Whales has been working alongside ORCA for over ten years by submitting data to the charity and raising awareness of the importance of the Bay of Biscay as a world-class whale watching location. Once received, ORCA inputs our data into a database and makes it available to research students that use it to answer key conservation questions. ORCA is also a member of the Atlantic Research Coalition (ARC), an international partnership established to provide vital pan-European monitoring data on whales, dolphins and seabirds.

In addition to our own research, The Company of Whales is dedicated to supporting conservation in the wider environment by donating a proportion of each booking made by wildlife groups travelling onboard. In this way, we have made valuable contributions to the work of ORCA, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Wildlife Trusts, and several local bird and mammal groups. If you would like to know more about this scheme, please contact us.