Minke whale: the eight-metre animal you will probably miss

There is a good chance you have already been within a few hundred metres of a minke whale off this coast and never knew. They are the commonest baleen whale in Irish water and one of the least obvious animals in it.

The animal

Balaenoptera acutorostrata, the common minke whale. Around seven to nine metres and several tonnes — small for a baleen whale, enormous by every other standard. Dark grey-black above, pale below, with a sharply pointed head and a curved dorsal fin set well back along the body.

The clearest identification feature is a white band across each flipper. You will rarely see it from a clifftop, but it is diagnostic when a whale rolls.

Why they are hard to see

A minke surfaces low and briefly. The blow is weak and often invisible — unlike a fin whale, you cannot rely on spotting a spout. What you get instead is the head breaking the surface, then a long dark back rolling forward, and the dorsal fin appearing near the end of the roll. The whole thing takes a couple of seconds and does not repeat in the same place.

They are also usually alone. There is no splashing group to draw your eye the way there is with common dolphins.

How to actually spot one

Do not scan for a whale. Scan for the food, and for the birds working over it.

• Find a concentration of seabirds feeding hard in one patch. That is bait fish being driven up, and a minke is often what is driving it.

• Pick a spot with height and settled water. Calm, overcast conditions beat bright glare and chop every time.

• Give it time. Twenty patient minutes on one patch of sea beats an hour of sweeping the horizon.

• Binoculars help, but find the animal with your eyes first — the field of view is too narrow to search with.

Watch the birds, not the water. Seabirds find the fish, and the whale is under the fish.

When they are here

Minke are recorded off the Irish coast through much of the year, but sightings build through summer and peak in late summer and autumn, as the water is at its warmest and bait fish are inshore in numbers. That is the same window in which the mackerel are about, and it is not a coincidence — minke feed on schooling fish like herring, sprat and mackerel, lunging up through a bait ball rather than filtering slowly.

The Loop Head peninsula and the cliffs south of Kilkee are among the better-known watching points on this stretch of coast, and the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group publishes sightings if you want to see what has been reported recently.

Ireland is a whale sanctuary

In 1991 Ireland declared its waters a whale and dolphin sanctuary, the first country in Europe to do so. Minke are still hunted commercially elsewhere in the North Atlantic, which is worth knowing when you are watching one feed off the Clare coast.

If you are on the water and one appears, let it decide the distance. Hold your course and speed rather than turning towards it — a whale that wants a closer look will come, and one that does not should not have to leave.

Sea conditions for Kilkee are live on our home page — calm, grey days are the ones to go looking.