What you can see, month by month
Counts of recorded cetacean sightings in the waters around Pico, by month. The migratory giants, blue, fin and sei, cluster in spring. Sperm whales are recorded in every month of the year. These are records, not animals, and not a probability: read the caveat below before you plan around them.
29,514 occurrence records across 11 species, from OBIS, extracted 19 Sep 2026, licensed CC BY 4.0. Every row links the exact query behind it.
Area queried: POLYGON((-28.65 38.25, -27.95 38.25, -27.95 38.7, -28.65 38.7, -28.65 38.25))
| Species | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sperm whale Recorded in 12 of 12 months 11,027 records ↗ | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Blue whale Recorded in 5 of 12 months 678 records ↗ | – | – | 2 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | – | – | – | – | – |
| Fin whale Recorded in 7 of 12 months 1,137 records ↗ | – | – | 1 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Sei whale Recorded in 7 of 12 months 428 records ↗ | – | – | – | 4 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | – | – |
| Common dolphin Recorded in 8 of 12 months 6,297 records ↗ | – | – | 1 | 3 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | – | – |
| Bottlenose dolphin Recorded in 8 of 12 months 2,121 records ↗ | – | – | 1 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 2 | – | – |
| Risso's dolphin Recorded in 8 of 12 months 3,340 records ↗ | – | – | 1 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | – | – |
| Atlantic spotted dolphin Recorded in 7 of 12 months 2,802 records ↗ | – | 1 | – | – | 1 | 2 | 6 | 6 | 3 | 1 | – | – |
| Striped dolphin Recorded in 8 of 12 months 792 records ↗ | – | – | 1 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | – | – |
| Orca Recorded in 6 of 12 months 67 records ↗ | – | – | 1 | 6 | 3 | 6 | 1 | 2 | – | – | – | – |
| Short-finned pilot whale Recorded in 8 of 12 months 825 records ↗ | – | 1 | – | 1 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | – | – |
August on the water
Ranked by how many records this month holds for each species. A dash means no records in that month.
What the numbers are
Counts of records in a fixed box of water, not counts of animals and not a chance of seeing one. A row is scaled against its own busiest month, so colours compare months within a species, never species with each other.
The catch: effort
Records are made by people on boats, and boats go out in summer. Every species here falls to few or no records in December and January. That is a fact about boats, not about whales, and it is the main reason this table is not a forecast.
The rules boats work to
Azorean law sets a 50 m minimum approach and allows no more than three boats within 300 m of a group, or 500 m for whales.