Focus Trends, Analysis, Perspective

Whales Return To The Big Apple, Lured By Menhaden And … Times Square?

- Kim Kavin

On an otherwise typical day in August 2015, John Wald-man looked around the waters near his home off Hemp-stead Harbor, on Long Island’s north shore. Usually when he gazed out, he saw the blue shimmer of Long Island Sound. On that day, however, he saw the unmistakable silver glint of menhaden, a fish known locally as bunker.

“There was solid bunker from the inside of my harbor out to the middle of the sound,” Waldman says. “There were acres and acres and acres of them. Fishermen said they’d never seen anything like it.”

Two months later a humpback whale believed to be feeding on menhaden not only swam into Hempstead Harbor, but also kept coming until the water was about 15 feet deep, Waldman says. Around the same time, New York Newsday ran a photo of a humpback breaching near there, snapped by a stunned fisherman aboard a 22-foot Grady-White from about 20 feet away.

That autumn, Waldman went to the other side of Long Island to surf-cast off Jones Beach on the south shore. “There was a solid ribbon of menhaden from the shore to about 300 feet out,” he says, noting that many were juvenile, or “peanut bunker,” nicknamed for their size. “The water was black from their bodies for as far as I could see, several miles, the peanut bunker.”

Fishermen near there also saw whales emerge with the schools of menhaden off Rockaway, New York. “The whales were among these schools and coming right up against these anglers and scaring the hell out of them, coming right up to the boats with their mouths wide open,” Waldman says.