Maine’s record for this dolphin is modest: 38 reports since 2000, and 28 of them carry no county at all because they were logged from open water. The onshore scatter is what you’d expect along this coast: Washington County leads with 4, and Cumberland, Hancock, and York counties fill in the rest, a thin line of sightings and strandings from the southern beaches to Downeast.
August dominates the calendar with 21 records, and that’s the one month when Maine’s whale-watch boats, research cruises, and summer crowds are all on the water at once, so observer effort explains at least part of the spike. The Gulf of Maine is genuine habitat for the species, a cold-water dolphin that follows herring and other schooling fish, so the low numbers say more about how rarely offshore animals get reported than about how rarely they occur. NatureServe hasn’t ranked the species in Maine. For an animal that lives beyond the breakers, a quiet record is normal, not a warning sign.
Full species profile
