Clear Sunset and Foggy Whales

Two nights ago we took time to head out to the west side and enjoy a classic San Juan summer sunset. There weren't many clouds to reflect the colors, but the madrone trees made for some interesting photos. Here is my favorite one of the night:

By yesterday the morning the fog had moved in full force, but the whales were somehow picked up anyway heading south towards San Juan Island. I headed out to Lime Kiln to test my luck at spotting whales in the fog, and within 15 minutes of my arrival someone spotted a whale breaking through the fog. There was less than 1/4 mile visibility, which always makes for kind of a magical encounter. You can't really see the whales coming or going, they are just suddenly there right in front of you, then just as suddenly gone again.

K26 Lobo did just that - I didn't see him at all until he did a huge lunge just offshore of where I was sitting. He lunged a few times in different directions - pursuing a fish perhaps? - before heading on south with the others.

Here is Lobo with his younger brother K36 Yoda. This photo really captures what it felt like with the haze. No auto focus today - I had to try my hand at manually focusing which is really difficult because you never know where the whale is going to pop up next. I think I did all right this time though!

K-Pod From Lime Kiln

Whale-watching is part of my job, so what do I do on my days off? Whale-watch, of course! This afternoon I hung out on the westside of San Juan Island and was lucky enough to see K-Pod twice: once as they headed north and again as they came south. When they were swimming south they were fighting against a strong flood tide going in the opposite direction. They often swim closer to shore in these conditions, presumably to take advantage of the back eddies that will help them along. They also seem to put more effort into their swimming. Here is K20 Spock lunging high out of the water as she fights the current:

Lately it seems like all four of K13 Skagit's offpsring have been hanging out together, whether she is around or not. That was the case today when K20 Spock, K25 Scoter, K27 Deadhead, and K34 Cali were all together along with Spock's first offpsring K38 Comet. Spock is such a distinctive whale with her bold open saddle patch (an open saddle patch has black in it, as opposed to a solid saddle patch that is all gray). Here she is with younger brother Cali:

K27 Deadhead is more of a non-descript whale, having a "plain" saddle patch and no distinguishing features like notches or nicks on her dorsal fin. She used to be really hard for me to identify for those reasons, but with the whole family group traveling together as of late it's easier to find her. Here's a nice look at her in the photo below. She's 15....having a calf soon would definitely help find her in a crowd, and she's just about that age! Notice L87 Onyx diving in the background behind her:

After that whole family group traveling by next came the K14 and K16 families. A family is always named for the oldest female in the matriline - so the K14s include K14 and all of her offspring, and any of her offpsring's offpsring if they were old enough. K14 had a new calf last year, K42, who now that he has survived his first year of life will get a name this year. There's a pretty high mortality rate during year one, so it's always great to see the little ones return and see how much they have grown. Here is K42 following along with his family:

Even with a baby like K42 in tow, older siblings will still follow along with their mothers. Resident killer whales are unique in that both male and female offpsring stay with their mother for their entire life. Here is K36 Yoda with mom K14 Lea - she was named after Princess Leia, having been born the same year (1977) as Star Wars was released. As a Star Wars fan myself, it irks me to no end that they spelled her name wrong!

Finally, there were some kayakers just offshore of my perch on the rocks that got a pretty sweet view today, as well. Earlier in the day there were some "bad" kayakers that paddled right out into the middle of the whales and kept paddling to keep right with them. The kayakers in the photo below are demonstrating compliance with the current guidelines, which is to raft up and stay in a kelp bed while the whales go by. They got rewarded with an awesome view of 6 whales swimming in a line right past them!

J-Pod Boys, J-Pod Babies, and a Bait Ball

This afternoon on the Western Prince we met up with J-Pod as they headed north along the southwest side of San Juan Island. It was a cool day because we got to see all of the big males and both calves in the pod. We started paralleling them in front of Cattle Point Lighthouse, which is always a picturesque photo opportunity. The photo below shows on the left adult male J1 Ruffles (who had a piece of kelp trailing from his fin for several surfacings), then three siblings who from left to right are calf J45, youngster J40 Suttles, and young male J30 Riptide. (As always, click on a photo to see a larger view - several of these look much better bigger!)

We got a closer look at J30 Riptide a moment later. When he was a juvenile he was so hard to pick out of a crowd, but at the age of 14 his fin has sprouted to a very tall height for a young male. He's easy to find now!

Another young male is J34 Doublestuf who is 11 and pictured below. His fin has really "sprouted" this year. When he first came back this spring I didn't recognize him because he's grown so much from last year! We also saw with him the rest of the family group known as "The Cookies" - his mom J22 Oreo and younger sibling J38 Cookie.

J27 Blackberry, yet another J-Pod male, is pictured below. It's great to see so many tall fins, because a few years ago J1 Ruffles was the only breeding age male in the pod!

Here's a cool shot of a rhinoceros auklet flying over J27 Blackberry:

Next we followed along J27 Blackberry and his younger brother J39 Mako for a little while. They soon met up with another small group of whales and started doing what looked like some foraging. While all the whales had been traveling north at a steady pace, this small group totally stalled out and started circling, probably in pursuit of some fish. One or two of them even logged at the surface, which is just what it sounds like - hanging at the surface like a log!

I was really trying to figure out who it was we were watching, and it took a good close look at my photos after the trip and some input from my friend Jeanne to figure out who it was. We had the three siblings J27 Blackberry, J31 Tsuchi, and J39 Mako with new calf J44, who is the offpsring of J17 Princess Angeline. What really threw me off was seeing J31 Tsuchi with the calf J44, because Tsuchi doesn't have any offpsring of her own yet! At the age of 14, she could very well be ready to have a calf soon, so maybe she was practicing by babysitting J44 for J17 Princess Angeline, the mom who wasn't in sight! J35 Talequah, the older daughter of Princess Angeline, was present, too, so maybe she was keeping an eye on her baby sibling, too.

From left to right J35 Talequah, J27 Blackberry, calf J44, and J31 Tsuchi - an odd mixture of two whales each from two different family groups!

On our way back to Friday Harbor we swung out by Salmon Bank where we could see a huge bait ball. A bait ball is a school of fish that has been hearded together by diving birds like auklets, and then other birds like sea gulls take advantage of the condensed group of food by feeding on the little fish from the surface. Sometimes there are just a few birds involved, but they can become quite large with hundreds or even of thousands of birds engaged in the feeding frenzy. Here are a bunch of glaucous-winged and Heermann's gulls that were part of this bait ball:

The rhinoceros auklets, a stout little bird related to puffins, do most of the work by diving down and herding the bait fish together. They're remarkable birds in that they often carry several fish in their mouth at a time, pushing them into grooves on the roof of their mouth to carry them or allow them to go back for more. Here a rhino auklet runs along the surface of the water as he tries to become airborne:

Success! He has taken flight, with two pretty large fish in his beak:

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Cross Jellies and Beach Bugs

This morning when I looked into the water between the houseboat and the dock there were clusters of clear jellyfish. Usually this time of year we're seeing moon jellies, but these are actually cross jellies (Mitrocoma cellularia), a species I haven't ever noticed here before. The white stalks are giant plumose annemonies, there's some seaweed floating on the surface, and the photographer was accidentally captured, too:

In turns out there were hundreds and hundreds of cross jellies just about everywhere today, floating along with the currents. I wonder where they all came from?

This afternoon while taking a walk down at South Beach with some friends and family, we came across this bizarre looking insect. I've never seen anything like it, but it was distinct enough that it wasn't too hard to use the field guide to identify it as a banded alder borer (Rosalia funebris), a round-necked longhorn beetle:

They're found from Alaska to California and are mostly a coastal insect. This one was very cooperative as multiple cameras came in for some macro shots, just crawling slowly along a piece of driftwood. How often is it you get the specimen and the field guide in the same shot?!

My dad then found another insect that he immediately named a "gray sandhopper". Gullible as always, I thought he actually knew what it was, but he was just giving it an appropriate name off the top of his head. I'm not able to narrow this down any more than a member of Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, katydids). Any thoughts?

Local, Regional, or Global Phenomenon?

This morning my dad forwarded me a discussion that has been going on via the e-mail listserv Oregon Birders Online regarding pelican distribution. It seems this year that American white pelicans are more widely distributed this time of year than usual, which has prompted the discussion. Someone else pointed out that maybe there is a more widespread phenomenon going on, as brown pelicans and magnificant frigatebirds (another member of the pelican family) are also being seen in more and different places this season.

That got me thinking about all the different marine mammal patterns we've been seeing this year in the San Juan Islands.

* The orcas, of course, were noticeably absent this spring, and didn't really fall into their "normal" summer traveling routes until maybe three weeks ago.

* The gray whales in Puget Sound are hanging around a lot later than usual this year.

* We had some humpback whale sightings in June - we usually don't see them until September/October.

* Dall's porpoise, formerly abundant, are almost non-existent this season, while harbor porpoise are far more abundant than in recent years.

* There have been more elephant seal sightings in the area, and even a sea otter sighting. (Sea otters and elephant seals were both hunted out of the area historically. Elephant seals have slowly been expanding their range north again and there is a reintroduced population of sea otters on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, and we had several sightings in the summer of 2006. But elephant seals are uncommon and sea otters rare.)

* It seems like there are more minke whales around, or at least they are gathering in numbers of 5-10 at some of the feeding areas, instead of just seeing 1-2 at a time.

When I've tried to do some research into some of this - for instance, are changes in bait fish numbers influencing baleen whale and porpoise patterns? - there is often very little information. Bait fish aren't of commercial interest, so nobody even really knows what bait fish populations are doing. On one hand, I'm amazed at how little we know about the ocean and some of the largest creatures in it. On the other hand, it's clearly an amazingly complex system. So, whatever is going on with our local marine life, I have a feeling its all somehow connected and not just a random coincidence that we're seeing all these different sightings this year.

As my dad said this morning when he forwarded me that e-mail, "It takes folks from different disciplines to think a bit wider than their discipline to understand some of these things." Some birders might notice some odd bird sightings, and some whale-watchers some odd whale sightings, but unless we get a discussion going about what we're seeing and how all this could be related we have no chance of even getting an inkling of what is going on.

Pileated Woodpeckers and Lion's Mane Jellyfish

My mom is up to visit and camp for a week, and while I was at her campsite helping her set up a pair of pileated woodpeckers flew in. They are always so cool to see, as they are the largest woodpecker in North America (15-20 inches long). One of my first bird-watching memories is watching a pair of pileated woodpeckers and their young come to our suet feeders in my parent's backyard when I was a little girl. We don't see them often in my parents neighborhood anymore, but in general they are steadily increasing across their range. Here is the one photo I got showing both members of the pair, with the male on the left and the female on the right:

They were flying from tree to tree for a few minutes, giving me a chance to snap off several phtoos of both the male and female. Here's a better shot of just the male:

Back at the houseboat, we spotted a lion's mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata) swimming just off the dock. Lion's manes are the largest known species of jellyfish, with one specimen that washed up in 1870 measuring a bell of 7.5 feet and tentacles of more than 120 feet long, which makes it officially the longest animal on the planet exceeding the lengths of even a blue whale. Of course, not all specimens are anywhere near that large; in fact, most of them are about the size of the one we saw today - about 20 inches across the bell and maybe tentacles one to two feet long:

Lion's mane jellyfish live only in the cold waters of the northern hemisphere and are one of the two most common jellyfish I see, the other being the moon jelly. I would love to better understand the seasonal fluxes of jellyfish, as some seasons one species or the other will be especially plentiful or noticeably absent. Lately there have been rafts of tiny moon jellies floating around, but this is the first lion's mane that I've seen in quite some time.

Ks, Ls, and an Electrical Storm

On this overcast morning we set off for our first trip on the day on the Western Prince with a charter from the St. Mary's Marine Science School from Australia. We didn't have a whale report when we left the dock, but since the whales headed north last night we figured they would be picked up soon. Sure enough, we were not far from the harbor when we heard there were whales heading south in Rosario Strait.

It was a bit of a foggy morning, and if its not totally socked in I love to see the islands in the fog:

We picked up a small group of whales and as we hung out watching them they seemed indecisive as to which way to go. It sounded like the large group of whales had split and were taking different channels south. The group we were with was just off the north end of Cypress Island, and kept moving back and forth along the shoreline, at one point stopping to play in a kelp bed and surface with fronds draped over their dorsal fins and tails. Finally, they decided to head south down the east side of the island, and that's when we got a close enough look at a few of them to determine that K21 Cappuccino and his sister K40 Raggedy were in the group. Viewing the orcas in Rosario Strait is one of the most beautiful places in the islands to see them:

For this afternoon's public trip we headed south to meet up with the whales again off the west side of Lopez Island. The L2 family group was leading the way, and we saw L2 Grace with her sons L78 Gaia and L88 Wavewalker. Regular blog readers may remember that a couple of Sundays ago we had a close encounter with Wavewalker...well the same thing happened again this Sunday! We were paralleling along side of him when all of a sudden he veered closer and gave us a nice look at his left side:

A little later we were viewing K11 Georgia, who is the oldest female in K-Pod at an estimated age of 76, and L87 Onyx, who spends most of his time with K11 and family since his mother died a few years ago. While we were watching the two of them, Wavewalker snuck up behind us again and this time passed showing us his right side. I just happened to have the camera pointed in the right place at the right time when he appeared and got this cool sequence of shots of him surfacing:

After Wavewalker passed us by, we saw some more of K11's family group, including her son K25 Scoter, her daughter K20 Spock, and her grandson K38 Comet. It's really great to see Spock and Comet traveling with the rest of their pod again, as a month ago was that strange incident where they were the only two resident whales in the area, separate from the rest of their family, which is something I had never seen before.

The other strange thing that happened today is we got caught in an electrical storm. We don't get many thunderstorms out here, but we had some rain and thunder last night with the prediction for potentially more this evening. I can't call what we experienced today a thunderstorm, however, because while it was raining there was no thunder or lightning. The first thing we experienced was one of our passengers getting a strong electric shock from one of the hand rails. Then someone noticed that everyone's hair was standing straight up, like it does with any type of static electricity. When the antenna on top of the boat started buzzing we knew something weird was really going on. Captain Hobbes had us all go either inside or under the cover of the back seating area and turned off all the ship's electronics. Thankfully, it passed within a few minutes and no lightning strikes were seen, but it was a very bizarre (and a little scary) thing to witness!