OCEAN CITY — OCEAN CITY - Peering toward choppy gray waves and a smear of mid-July humidity that shrouded the horizon early yesterday, Val-Jean Slowinski kept her binoculars at the ready. Trouble was, if you were out scouting dolphins, as she was, it turned into a day at the beach.
For the past 17 years, scientists and staff from the National Aquarium in Baltimore and its Marine Animal Rescue program have recruited volunteers such as Slowinski, a Towson resident who summers at the ocean, to help count the bottlenose dolphins as they skim along sandbars and shoals, surfacing to breathe above the murky waves along Maryland's 26-mile coast.
"Dolphins are a love of mine," said Slowinski, a retired speech pathology teacher who spent three hours scanning the sea from the beach at 40th Street.
"Usually, I come to the beach in the late afternoon, and if they've found some food, they'll stay a while. But that's the thing - you never know where they'll be, where you'll see them," Slowinski said.
Even with a dozen staff members and their eager helpers spread out about every 20 blocks or so from Assateague to the Delaware line, the count doesn't resemble anything like an exact science, Maryland organizers say. And the dolphins go where they wish.
"This is a general census of the coastal migratory stock we have here in the Mid-Atlantic," said Jennifer Dittmar, who runs the aquarium's stranding response program. "The count doesn't tell us much right away, but it becomes a part of a bigger picture. And it gives people a chance to get involved."
Over the years, some researchers have settled on an estimate of 15,000 bottlenose that inhabit Mid-Atlantic waters, but Dittmar says it is impossible to pinpoint an exact number that spend their summers here.
The dolphins range from Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina to Delaware. Occasionally, they'll wander as far as Cape Cod or Florida. Typically, they're here from May until September, searching not only for food but for pleasant water temperatures. Ideal water for dolphins is not far from what humans enjoy - 72 to 74 degrees.
Yesterday, staff members and volunteers staked out vantage points, scrambling during the three-hour shift to tally as many dolphins as they could see as the animals splashed out of the surf, pursuing their favorite foods: herring, bluefish and menhaden.
