Seconds later, a few metres away, another smaller fluke emerged. It had been a rare sign of good news for the beleaguered North Atlantic right whale, among the most endangered species on the planet. As their population has plummeted by 25% over the past decade, the scientists were thrilled to spot a thriving calf, one of just seven born in 2019.

Michael Moore, director of the Marine Mammal Center at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was staring through an enclosed viewfinder. He had to guide a drone to just the right spot over the whales, which in recent years have experienced a spike in deaths and a drop in births. He had the tricky task of flying through a fine mist showering from their blowholes, to collect vapour samples that would help his team test for bacteria to gauge the health of the whales. “The good news is the right whales are still out there doing their thing,” Moore told me on that cold spring morning aboard his boat. “They still have the potential to do what they have to do to survive as a species. We just have to let them do it.”

It was my first shoot directing a new film I’d started working on that sought to chronicle the efforts to protect right whales from extinction; the impacts of those efforts on the lobster industry, the most valuable fishery in North America; and how the National Marine Fisheries Service in the United States has struggled to balance its conflicted mission of promoting commercial fisheries and protecting endangered species.

I had been writing about right whales for years as the environment reporter at The Boston Globe. But this was my first time seeing the iconic species, and we were greeted with an acrobatic spectacle, as scores of whales that were congregating in Cape Cod Bay to feed on a rice-sized form of plankton kept breaching the surface and belly flopping with a huge splash, sometimes a few metres from the boat.