Country diary: bottlenose dolphin attack shatters Flipper illusions

Chanonry Point, Moray Firth: These cetaceans kill their porpoise cousins. Do they see them as competition for food? Or are they just killing for sport?

There are occasions when nature shatters our cosy assumptions. Last week we were watching the bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) on the Moray Firth, much loved by tourists because they come so close to shore. They flip and leap, roll and dive, singly or in pods of a dozen or more, only a few yards from camera-clicking visitors thronging the shingle spit.

The dolphins gather in the Chanonry narrows to feast on salmon migrating upstream to spawn. We often see salmon being flung high in the air and swallowed whole. A feeding spectacle. We know dolphins eat fish and we are comfortable with it. But what we witnessed in front of our lenses that day spun us into shock. Forget film-star Flipper, forget frolicking Fungie in Dingle Bay, forget chummy Sebastian in Disney's Shark Tale - these Moray Firth dolphins are killers.