Strange, but productive is how Andrew Stevenson described the whale season that has just ended.“We have just finished our sixth season of research,” said Mr Stevenson who made the film ‘Where the Whales Sing’ and wrote ‘Whale Song: Journeys into the Secret Lives of the North Atlantic Humpbacks’.He started his whale research accidentally, while making a film on the humpback whales. During the making of that film he started collecting data and realised he was providing unique insight into the pelagic migratory social behaviour of humpback whales.Humpback whales pass Bermuda from January to April. Individual humpback whales can be identified by the pattern on their flukes. Each one is unique in the way that human fingerprints are unique. Mr Stevenson said the season was strange because unusually warm weather in March meant researchers spent more time in the water than usual.“We had a fantastic start to the season with lots of fluke identifications early on,” said Mr Stevenson. “As we all know, we had incredible weather in March and this gave us a fantastic data set for March, a time when we rarely get out on the water due to inclement weather conditions at that time. We obtained over half of our 205 fluke identifications this year in those two weeks alone. Interestingly enough, and contrary to popular opinion, these whales weren’t migrating early [due to global warming or whatever], at least not from our data. Of the 108 flukes identified in March, only five of these whales had been seen before in Bermuda, and they were all resightings from the previous five seasons, in March. After that great start, we had bad weather the first two weeks of April prime time for collecting data on the whales. But we did manage to finish with a flourish.”He has found that the whales tend to be very punctual and pass Bermuda during the same week every year, but there is an exception in every bunch. This year, Candle, an old favourite, appeared nearly two months earlier than expected.“After a long season in 2012 [over 25 days on the water using 11 different boats], we obtained 205 individual fluke identifications,” said Mr Stevenson. “This brings our total for the six seasons we have been doing this to at least 635 individual fluke identifications. To give this some context, the number of fluke identifications made here in Bermuda by residents or visiting scientists was a total 145 over the previous 40 years.”Twenty of the whales identified had been seen in previous years. Now that researchers are starting to recognise some of the whales they are able to see patterns developing and fill in gaps in data created by weather conditions and the inability to get out on the water.This season, four interns from the United States and England helped with the fluke identification project.The entire Bermuda whale fluke catalogue is now on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/whalesbermuda/tags.Useful website: www.whalesbermuda.com.