Baby Dolphin!!!!!!11!! Woot!!!

So saturday's unbelievably cute animal was made to look positively uncute by events that transpired Sunday. We arrived on the dive boat at one of the shallow sandy bays used here as harbours by tourist yachts to pick up some more divers and as we did so the shot went up of dolphins. Now seeing dolphins is fairly rare here as it is but as soon as I clapped eyes on the fins I knew something was different to normal.

At first I thought they might be a couple of small porpoises of some sort as opposed to the more commonly seen bottlenosed or spotted dolphins as they were smaller than I expected and suddenly we got a clearer view and realised we had a cow and calf. There's the calf taking a big breath.

Baby mammals of all species are not quite as slick at moving around as the adults and as with cute deer, gazelles, horses and sheep on land so with dolphins in the sea. He gave us the full bambi on ice routine of goofy baby swimming. First the little dude's head would pop straight up and then his tail would frantically flap thin air as he timed his surfacing wrong. It was a nightmare with digicam shutterlag so I switched to video....lets hope dolphin parents don't do the embarassing baby videos in front of dates thing for his sake:

Very young dolphins such as this one (and I really do think he was probably born an hour or two before we arrived that morning) need to breathe far more often at first and often need a little help and guidance from mother at this time. We were told a pod had been seen nearby the previous night and I suspect the mother had broken off to give birth alone in a nice sandy protected area that would be relatively protected from both harsh open water conditions and big predators (in this area this could only really be tiger or possibly bull sharks). When we returned an hour and a half later the little one was moving out into open water and swimming far more securely and breathing in almost the same controlled fashion as mother. So yeah Sunday was a good day.