The easternmost town in the United States. Also home of a well known lighthouse on West Quoddy Head which is the easternmost point on the U.S. mainland. For those of you who may question, Lubec is not the easternmost city as that would be Eastport. One thing is for certain: it is definitely very far east. It pretty much sits on the border of Maine and Canada. You can even see Campobello Island, New Brunswick just across the FDR Memorial Bridge. Well…most days. Actually, not even today. I am quickly discovering Lubec has a bit of a fog problem…

Anyway, beautiful Lubec Maine is also situated near the Bay of Fundy, just on the other side of Campobello Island. And that’s exactly why we are here. What makes the Bay of Fundy so special to us, you ask? Right whales. More specifically, right whale moms and their calves. Our study looks at the behavior between right whale mom/calf pairs to figure out why they are so susceptible to collisions with boats. We mainly look at vocal behavior and calf vocal development. In order to make our study more valuable, we need to study the mom/calf pairs from birth to weaning. This requires us to travel pretty far! All right whales give birth down in the southeast U.S., but they don’t all come to the Bay of Fundy in the summer. Which means there aren’t always a lot of mom/calf pairs here. Add that to the fog problem and you understand why we need all the time we can get up here to give us a fighting chance for some data!

Even though we couldn’t go out today, I did get a chance to do some hiking. Luckily for you I brought my camera so you can see just how lovely (and foggy) Lubec can be. Fingers crossed for tomorrow though!