. The Canadian field-naturalist. 126 The Canadian Field-Naturalist Vol. 104. Figure 1. Drawing of an adult male Sowerby's Beaked Whale, Mesoplodon bidens (redrawn from Watson 1981). of Mesoplodon bidens on the British coastUne from 1913 to 1972. Moore (1966) concluded that the relative abundance of Mesoplodon bidens strandings on the European side of the Atlantic, in a gross way, was related to the greater abundance of animals living in that vicinity compared to the Western Atlantic. Saemundsson (1939) suggested the species has an open sea distribution with occasional visits to coastal waters.
. The Canadian field-naturalist. 126 The Canadian Field-Naturalist Vol. 104. Figure 1. Drawing of an adult male Sowerby's Beaked Whale, Mesoplodon bidens (redrawn from Watson 1981). of Mesoplodon bidens on the British coastUne from 1913 to 1972. Moore (1966) concluded that the relative abundance of Mesoplodon bidens strandings on the European side of the Atlantic, in a gross way, was related to the greater abundance of animals living in that vicinity compared to the Western Atlantic. Saemundsson (1939) suggested the species has an open sea distribution with occasional visits to coastal waters. Recent records from eastern Canada (Sergeant and Fisher 1957; Dix et al. 1986; Lien et al. 1990) suggest that the animals frequent waters off this coast fairly regularly. Altogether, seven individual strandings, two mass strandings involving a total of nine whales, and two live sightings of Mesoplodon bidens have been recorded from 1906 to 1988 in the Western North Atlantic. These are listed in Table 1 and locations are shown in Figure 3. Most of these events have been recorded in the last 15 years and over half in the past four years. This does not likely indicate an influx or redistribution of the species to the western North Atlantic, but rather reflects recent increases in the efficiency of North American stranding networks (Lien et al. 1990) as well as verifiable field identification through the use of photography. Mesoplodon bidens was first recorded in the Northwest Atlantic on shores in 1867 when an adult male was stranded on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts (Allen 1906). A stranding of a 488 cm female occurred at Nantucket, Massachusetts in September 1982. The most recent stranding was of a 457 cm male which occurred at Port St. Joe on the Gulf Coast of Florida in October 1984 (J. G. Mead, Division of Mammals, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, ; personal com- munication). The remaining specimens of Mesoplodon bidens in North America were all recorded i
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