The Southern Right Whales

Whale watching at Península Valdés is one of Argentina's greatest attractions! Twenty-meter-long southern right whales come to the Península Valdés in order to give birth and raise their young. They arrive at Valdés at the beginning of June and stay until the end of December. The whale watching tours leave from Puerto Pirámide on the Península Valdés by boat to set out to find the big southern right whales.
They pass a pyramid shaped rock formation of which the town of Puerto Pirámide derives its name.
After sailing for another 10 minutes,the large female southern right whales can be spotted. In the distance you can clearly see something big surfacing and moving around. As the guide steeres you closer, the mother whale stretches her abdomen and sticks her five-meter-wide tail out of the water. While this large tail is standing up out of the water, the baby calf can be seen swimming around the mother and surfacing from time to time. There are also several seagulls who sit on the big fin and start picking away at it.

That's why the whale only sticks out his head and tail, while keeping most of her body under water. The seagulls actually eat her skin and always pick at the same spot. The whale has a marked area on her fin where the seagulls are constantly picking at it. A 20-meter long whale, attacked and eaten by seagulls!
There are studies being done to try to reduce the amount of seagulls in the area since 2006 and the permission to actually start capturing them with nets and replacing them for further study was given during the first six months of 2010 by an authorized boat.

House Sparrow

The House Sparrow is a very social bird. Today one of them visited our kitchen briefly before it flew out into the warm morning through the open door to the garden...
I used to sing about this friendly bird to our son when he was hospitalized with a broken leg. We could not see the sky from our little room in the hospital when my little two year old asked "Mum, can you call the doctors from the ambulance to take me home?" and chocking back my tears I tried to tell him that we needed to stay in the hospital for his bone to go back into place and then be able to set. So I sang about the friendly sparrow who visited our window and I prayed in my heart for God to heal and ease the pain!


Healing takes time but in the end the difficult tials we go through make us stronger and able to comfort others who undergo similar situations.
The little sparrow gifts us with his friendliness. It has been intentionally or accidentally introduced to many parts of the world, making it the most widely distributed wild bird. It is strongly associated with human habitations, but it is not the only sparrow species found near houses. It is a small bird, with feathers mostly different shades of brown and grey.