146 



fisheries were active and right whale populations were much larger. The only 

 other possible "high-use area" not currently occupied is Delaware Bay. Some 

 right whales were taken during Colonial times around Cape May, New Jersey. 

 It is not always clear whether these were coastal migrants or whether they 

 actually entered Delaware Bay. It has frequently been suggested that Dela- 

 ware Bay was once a major calving ground. However, the written descrip- 

 tions of large numbers of whales in the Bay date from the very early Colonial 

 era and are not clear as to species identity or numbers, and it has been specu- 

 lated that at least some of these whales may have been gray whales, known 

 to have existed in the North Atlantic into the Colonial era (Mead and Mitchell, 

 1984). 



P 3-8/1 4: Excluding the anomalous years of 1986 and 1987, between 1950 and 

 1989, right whales were seen in the Bays only 7 times in June and 4 times in 

 July (Kraus and Kenney, 1991). "Regular" occurrence is better described as 

 mid-February through May. Stellwagen Bank and Jeffreys Ledge are not 

 primary right whale feeding grounds, but only locations of sporadic sightings. 

 This paragraph again mixes the Bays with the larger western Gulf of Maine 

 region. Some right whales enter Cape Cod Bay in the late winter, with 25-40 

 individuals total over a given season (maximum of 54 in 1986). Peak occur- 

 rence is in April. They then leave and go to the Great South Channel, where 

 most or all of the population might feed in a given year. Peak occurrence 

 there is in May, with departure for Nova Scotia between the end of May and 

 early July, depending on year (Kenney, Winn, and Macaulay, in prep.). 1 

 continue to be skeptical about the Watkins and Schevill sighting of 70 in one 

 day; they were apparently with a group of right whales and assumed that all 

 of the distant blows they could see were also right whales. The figure of half 

 the total cataloged population visiting the Bays refers to over all years from 

 the entire database, and not to any single year. 



P 3-11/1 1/L 15-17: Kraus et al. (1987) is not the best reference for right whale 

 patterns in 1987; Figure 3-4 suggests that they included only sightings 

 through 1986 in their analysis. See Hamilton and Mayo (1990) or Kraus and 

 Kenney (1991) for later, more complete analyses. In 1987, there was a 

 summer residency similar to that in 1986, primarily east of Cape Cod. 



P 3-11/1 2/L 1-3: Many of the statements which have been made in the literature 

 concerning lack of recovery by right whales have been based on no data; 

 there are simply no quantitative estimates of right whale abundance in the 

 western North Atlantic prior to CETAP's in 1979. None of the references 

 cited here provide any data or statistical analyses relative to trends in right 

 whale abundance. My analysis of long-term trends in Great South Channel 

 sighting rates (which aie corrected for effects of changes in sighting effort as 



