November 10: A memorable day on the water

Things have been changing so much and so quickly in the Salish Sea; the transformations are astounding. When I first started spending time up here 20 years ago, both humpback and transient killer whales were rare sights. Now, they are around almost daily - even in November! With a friend up visiting for a long weekend, we headed out on the water with Maya's Legacy today and our sightings rivaled a good day during the "peak season" (whatever that is anymore!)

Early in the morning a report came in of the T18s near Orcas Island, and luckily they didn't travel too far too fast. We caught up with them at the west end of Spieden Channel, where they were first split into pairs with T18 Esperanza and T19 Spouter together, and T19 Mooyah and T19B Galiano about a mile further to the west.

18 year-old male T19C Spouter

A little while after we got there, the two groups merged and started making their way northwest up Haro. 

From left to right T19B Galiano, T18 Esperanza, and T19C Spouter

They were zig-zagging a bit, but their final surfacing before we left was perfectly lined up with the Turn Point l=Lighthouse. What a sight!

The T18s in front of the Turn Point Lighthouse

As we reversed course back through Spieden Channel we slowed down along Spieden Island. With its exotic wildlife, it rarely disappoints, but it was exceptional today. There were hundreds of Mouflon sheep, sika deer, and fallow deer out; more sika deer than I had ever seen, in fact!

Sika deer buck

It's also rutting season, which means there's plenty of drama unfolding! This male was bleating at these two very unimpressed females.

Male fallow deer bleating

We were distracted from the exotic wildlife when we spotted a family of river otters running along the hillside! They darted down into the water but 7 of them tried to all climb out on this little rock at the same time, some of them sneaking a curious look at us as we looked at them. One of the collective nouns for a group of otters is a "romp", and watching them today, you could see why!

A romp of sea otters

Down at Green Point there weren't any Steller sea lions hauled out, but there was a gang of them in the water. This one looks vicious in the photo, but he was just yawning.

We only got a quick look at the sea lions, because just across San Juan Channel was a humpback whale! We were shaking our heads in bewilderment at so many sightings on a chilly November afternoon! It was BCY0160 known as Heather, who seemed to just be doing circles.

BCY0160 Heather

It was just a short ride back to Friday Harbor from there, but I kept my camera out anyway, and I was glad I did! Eight ancient murrelets were flying amazingly fast, keeping pace with us for about a minute!

Ancient murrelets in San Juan Channel

By the end of the day, by my count, we had seen eight mammal species and about another dozen marine bird species - not too shabby!

July 29th with J-Pod

This has been such a crazy summer and I'm afraid I've been neglecting my blog a bit as a result! I want to catch up on some whale sightings posts, starting way back on the memorable day of July 29th. I've had these photos ready to go for a while but forgot I hadn't posted them!

Months in advance, we had scheduled an evening whale watch charter with good friends for July 29th. Shortly before it was time to the leave for the trip, J-Pod was heading north towards Lime Kiln, so I sprinted out them to catch them from shore before heading to the boat. Good decision! It was one of those special close passes. A few photos are below, but I also shared a short video of the pass here.

J16 Slick and J50 Scarlet give some kayakers the memory of a lifetime

 

It turned out to be the picture perfect night we had hoped for: flat calm waters, beautiful lighting, and J-Pod heading north near Stuart Island. 

J38 Cookie off the Turn Point Lighthouse

Most of J-Pod was hanging out in one of several tight, social groups, and we spent most of our time with the rambunctious boys J38 Cookie, J47 Notch, and J49 T'ilem I'nges.

From left to right J49 T'ilem I'nges, J47 Notch, and J38 Cookie

 Cookie has been in a very social/sexual mood lately, as evidenced by the following:

J38 Cookie

He's been doing a LOT of this lately >.<

"Sword fighting"

We also saw lots of surface activity from J47 Notch:

J47 Notch tail slap

Breach from J47 Notch

Another breach from J47 Notch

The only whale who was off on his own was J27 Blackberry, who seemed to be foraging off on the other side of us away from all the social action:

J27 Blackberry

And a beautiful ride home to top it off!

End of 2014: J-Pod Visits, Year List Recap

As another calendar year winds to an end, I thought my bird and whale sightings had about wrapped up for the year. While in Portland for Christmas I did have a nice walk at the Crown-Zellerbach trail that turned up about 30 species including the likes of sandhill cranes, cackling geese, western scrub-jays, and ring-billed gulls that aren't common species on the island. On our way back north, a very chilly walk at Nisqually NWR turned up the usual duck species, three bald eagles, a peregrine falcon, and this great blue heron, who we watched eat a salamander:

Turns out that would be the end of the birding for the year, so let's take a look at the year list totals:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
Total # Bird Species	233	203	222	192	201
Dave's Total	237	206	275/205*	192	179
Dad's Total		230	204	222	250
# States/ Provinces	6	4	5	4	5
# Life Birds	23	3	6	3	11
# SJ County Species	133?	157	145	149	142
# Species by Month
January	87	114	105	110	86
February	19	13	52	6	57
March	25	12	3	14	8
April	21	25	12	20	13
May	37	17	24	10	9
June	24	2	14	5	6
July	1	4	0	1	1
August	2	4	3	2	0
September	3	5	0	1	5
October	2	1	6	0	11
November	4	4	0	22	5
December	8	2	3	0	0

* World total/ Europe total

I just barely snuck into my target range of 200+ species this year. After an astonishing tie last year, this also feels like the first earned "win" in my annual year list challenge against Dave in England.  Not surprisingly, I got trounced again though by my now retired and free to travel a lot more Dad. :) The high totals on my list in February and for life birds were boosted by the trip to Southern California and Mexico, with another unusual spike in October when I made it east of the Cascades for my birthday trip. I'm actually surprised that with the Baja trip I didn't end up with even 10 more species than on last year's list. In 2015 the target will be the same 200 species mark, and we'll kick it off for the second year in a row on San Juan Island instead of in Oregon.

Surprisingly, the holidays didn't mark the end of my whale-watching for the year. My first full day back on island, December 30, included a visit from J-Pod! My boat is out of the water for the time being, but luckily a friend let me tag along as he headed out to look for the whales. We met up with them off Stuart Island, heading north.

J34 Doublestuf and J22 Oreo

The whales were SUPER spread out, with just ones and twos over at least 5+ miles. We were out there for over an hour, and probably saw 6-8 different whales during that time, when all of the 25+ members of J-Pod were out here somewhere.

Luckily, one of the whales we got to see was J27 Blackberry, who had been satellite tagged two days prior.

J27 Blackberry passes the Turn Point Lighthouse on Stuart Island

You can read more about the tagging project and follow his latest tracks on NOAA's website here. From the tag, we learned that earlier in the day, around 4-5 AM, Blackberry went waaaay up into Eastsound on Orcas Island, very unusual for the residents! But they've been taking lots of unusual travel patterns lately, as they've been spotted near Orcas Island and in Spieden Channel quite a lot this year.

The satellite tagging issue remains a controversial one, but I'm a strong supporter of it in hopes that the data it yields about winter travel patterns of these endangered Southern Residents leads to the increased protections they need. Data from whales tagged in previous years are the driving force behind a current petition to NOAA about expanding the Southern Residents' critical habitat range to include the outer coast from Washington to California. You can read more about why I support tagging on a previous blog post here.

J27 Blackberry with satellite tag visible as a bump on the right side of his dorsal fin - click to see a larger view

While for the most part the whales were in foraging/traveling mode, we did see one huge breach from Blackberry! I only caught the blurry end of it, but love the arcs of water off his pec fins so much I wanted to post it anyway:

It was such a beautiful day to be on the water - very cold, but flat calm waters and bright sunshine. And as we say in the Pacific Northwest, "the mountains were out" :)

Mt. Baker and the Turn Point light station

It's always a pleasure to see J2 Granny, and she spent some time hanging out near us too:

J2 Granny

Just about when it was time to leave, we saw a nice big spyhop:

We didn't know it at the time, but nearby the Center for Whale Research was getting their first looks at a brand new baby: J50 was born to J16 Slick sometime in the last couple days! Check out their website at the link above to see some awesome photos of the new calf. After a very difficult year for the Southern Residents in which their numbers dipped to 77 and no successful births for over two years, I can't help but hope that J50 is a good omen going into 2015. Slick has certainly been a prolific mama as this is her sixth known calf. She's tied for the oldest documented mother at age 42. Her other living offspring are J26 Mike, J36 Alki, and J42 Echo.

Thank you all for continuing to follow my whale and wildlife adventures, and I'm sure there will be plenty more in store for 2015!

Last Day Of May: J-Pod!!

Another month has slipped away and still the Southern Residents have been scarce. My May 9th blog post focused on how dismal April sightings have become, and it looks like May is following the same trend. I've compiled another graph to show just how bad it's gotten - you can see the Chinook numbers in orange have pretty much flat-lined in recent years.

Blue shows number of days Southern Residents were present in inland waters in the month of May from The Whale Museum's Orca Master data set with a red trendline. Orange shows average catch per unit effort (CPUE) for the month of May for Chinook Salmon on the Fraser River's Albion Test Catch fishery. This data set has a green trendline. NOTES: No test catch data available from 2007. 2001 data is from 25 days, 2002 data is from 24 days, all other years are an average of all 31 days of May.

The surprise yesterday morning, however, was that J-Pod was suddenly on the west side of San Juan Island! This is why the camera bag always stays packed, because I think I set record time from bed the west side. My first stop was at San Juan County Park, where I saw a few spread out whales slowly heading north. A friend alerted me that were still more whales to the south, so I jetted down to Lime Kiln, where the conditions were just perfect for watching whales: blue, flat calm waters and that gorgeous early morning sunlight. The J16s were slowly, slowly making their way north.

Spyhop from J42 Echo

Luckily I was able to get out late in the morning with Maya's Westside Charters. We didn't have to go far to catch up with the more northern group of J-Pod. The first whales we came across were J2 Granny and her companion L87 Onyx.

L87 Onyx

J2 Granny

The J14s were just a little further north, just goofing around by the looks of it.

Big tail wave from J49 Ti'lem I'nges

Not far away were J19 Shachi and her daughter J41 Eclipse. Eclipse is a special whale to me because I saw her when she was just a few days old - I always love seeking her out in my first J-Pod encounter of the year to see how much she's grown. She's going to be 9 this year!

Mama J19 Shachi

J41 Eclipse surfacing behind J19 Shachi

It seemed like there was a little indecision about whether or not to keep going north to the Fraser River, but eventually the decided to continue on up to and past Turn Point. We got beautiful looks as the headed into Boundary Pass:

J14 Samish

J40 Suttles and J45 Se-Yi-Chn

 Here's J37 Hy'Shqa followed by two year-old calf J49 Ti'lem I'nges:

There were surfacing in synchrony, almost like a resting line, with long dives in between. It was SO NICE to see these guys! So rejuvenating for the soul. It had been since Thanksgiving Day last year since I had seen J-Pod.

So this lead group was made up of the J14s, J19s, J2, and L87. There were more whales meandering north miles behind them, so we headed back and met up with the J16s. The same whales I had seen four hours earlier off Lime Kiln had finally made their way up towards Stuart Island, too.

The whole J16 family!

J26 Mike passing the Turn Point Lighthouse

We didn't see them, but the J22s were even further behind the J16s. Interestingly, the J11s and J17s were nowhere to be found. In recent years J-Pod has split into "Group A" and "Group B", but the J22s are usually part of Group B with the J11s and J17s, so this was a different split.

It was good to see the whales commit to going up to the Fraser River, as hopefully this means there's enough fish for them to stick around for a while! A friend got some photos of whales with fish in their mouths yesterday, so they were at least finding something to eat! Here's hoping they stick around for a while and kick June off the way it should be: with lots of residents in inland waters. Last year the first week of June was my best stretch of shore-based whale-watching over the course of the whole summer, and I wouldn't complain about a repeat!