Fifty shades of green: Our Orca excursion in Iceland (photoblog)
Blue words in this post are clickable.
Last week I wrote a blog about how to get it Northern Lights have photographed while I was on vacation in Iceland. That was a great experience, but we experienced even more beautiful in this holiday. Our list also included two (!) orca excursions. Orcas are the whales that will be known to many people after the movie Free Willy. Personally, I think it is one of the most beautiful whales, partly because of their beautiful black and white drawing.
They are (relatively) little boys, because although the dorsal fin of an adult male can reach 1.80 meters (that's the height of an adult human being!), the whole whale is “but” up to one meter or 8 large. By comparison, a blue whale is 25 metres long! Well, it may be the “little ones” of the sea, if you can admire them in real life they are imposing and beautiful animals.
Orcas are wandering through the waters in search of herring, their primary food, and those pegs don't stay in one place, so the orcas haunt them, to catch them. They do that catching smart: Orcas have a white belly. When they discover a school herring, they go upside down under the school pegs. The pegs then get completely confused, because white is air, so they swim upwards (while they think they swim down) away from the sky. Once on the surface, the pegs are ready for grabs. The orcas then swim in circles and eat the pegs.
In the months of January and February, the pegs, and therefore the orcas in northern Europe, swim the chance to spot orcas.! In Iceland, as well as in Norway, there are organizations that offer boat excursions to hopefully see these beautiful animals, and with a bit of luck: photographing!
