By San Juan Island Naturalist Ellie Sawyer
When we go out on a whale watch tour in the San Juan Islands, while you may only expect to see and learn about whales, our ecotours here in Friday Harbor offer so much more! You see harbor seals, bald eagles, sea stars, a number of different sea birds, and more islands than you can count - each with their own histories and personalities. And when you do see whales, your guides aren’t just looking at a species - they are looking at individuals with their own histories and personalities as well!
While on a whale watch this Thursday, we searched around the Southern Gulf Islands of Canada and what are referred to as the “outer islands” of the San Juan Islands - marine state parks and one privately owned island that crown the archipelago, known as Patos, Sucia, Matia, Barnes, and Clark Islands. Our boat was the first to find whales, and it was a sighting that I am always excited about - BCY0324 “Big Mama” with her eighth known calf.
Big Mama is a huge deal up here in the San Juans. While humpbacks have used these inland waters for summer feeding grounds since time immemorial, there was a sad time in our history when we didn’t have humpbacks here. At the beginning of the 20th century, whalers who were looking for work after decimating the whale populations of the Atlantic came here to harvest whales from the North Pacific. The most notorious of these whaling stations was in Nanaimo, B.C., in Piper’s Lagoon, and within years of its establishment, the known local population of humpback whales was extirpated. Because knowledge of the feeding grounds is cultural - handed down from mother to calf - it would be a long time before humpbacks would return here, and longer still before they returned with any regularity.
Big Mama was the first to be documented returning annually. She was first observed in 1997 by boat captain Mark Malleson, who was dismissed when he submitted his photo of her to a local newspaper - everyone knew that humpbacks didn’t come into our inland sea - but he was vindicated when she returned in 2001, and then again in 2003. When she appeared that third time, she had a calf in tow - and thus began what we affectionately refer to as the “humpback comeback”. Since her arrival in 1997, the humpback population has increased with abandon - the first published catalog in 2015 had 100 flukes of well-known whales, and every catalog since has eclipsed the last - the 2024 catalog has over 1,000 individuals published! We credit our beloved Big Mama with that return, and it is not uncommon to hear folks on the water refer to her as “Salish Sea royalty”. She is a mother of eight, a grandmother of six, and a great-grandmother of four.
While on scene with her and her calf, we watched her as she rode the rushing waters sweeping up over Boiling Reef - a huge upwelling zone between Eastpoint on Saturna Island and Patos Island that attracts marine life of all kinds to feed on the nutrient rich waters being pushed up from the sea floor. Her calf is likely around three months old now - born in the warm waters of Au’au channel in Maui - and was rolly-polly and rambunctious, giving us great looks at their fluke and pectoral fins. Big Mama was content to lazily feed while her infant played in the ebb tide spilling over the reef. We could have stayed there for a long time with this iconic mom and calf pair, but…there were other sightings that beckoned.
Most people who visit us here in the Salish Sea are here for one thing: our killer whales. The Salish Sea is the most accessible place in the world to see killer whales, due to the incredible biodiversity of the region. We are fortunate to see two separate subspecies of killer whales here: the resident killer whale (Orcinus orca ater) which primarily eats salmon and other fatty fish, and the Bigg’s killer whale (Orcinus orca rectipinnus) which eats almost exclusively marine mammals like harbor seals, harbor porpoise, and sea lions. While we were famous for the Southern resident killer whales of Free Willy fame, the lack of salmon in our region has led to a decline in sightings of this subspecies - but the success of the Marine Mammal Protection Act has led to a rebound of our pinniped species, leading to an increase in Bigg’s killer whale sightings over the past fifteen years.
We were fortunate enough to get on scene with one of my favorite families - the T123s. Matriarch T123 “Sidney” is always accompanied by her three offspring: adult male T123A “Stanley” and juvenile females T123C “Lucky” and T123D “Darcy”. We got on scene with them just in time for them to rush off in pursuit of something - what, we couldn’t initially tell, until we saw spouts off in the distance ahead of us. They were meeting up with another matriline of killer whales!
They breached and tail-lobbed, and once they joined up with the other family, they rolled and spy-hopped and breached some more - feeling incredibly social - and we figured out why soon after. The other family was T123’s younger sister, T46B “Raksha” and her kids - and her youngest grand-calf, recently named T46B3A “Munro”. This name is especially significant, given this family’s legacy - T123’s and T46B’s mother, T46 “Wake” was one of the Budd Inlet Six - six Bigg’s killer whales who were the subject of the last whale capture in Washington State. It was thanks to an aid to the governor at the time, as well as activists from the Evergreen College and other state legislators, that she and her companions were released. That governor’s aid was named Ralph Munro, and it would be his legacy to the state to put an end to whale captures in our inland waters as well as ending cetacean captivity in the state on the whole. Were it not for him, T46 would never have been freed, and she would never have been mother to eight calves, grandmother to fourteen, and great-grandmother to six. Of those descendants, twenty-five survive. While she passed away two years ago and former Washington Secretary of State passed away this past March, their legacy continues on - and the little two-month-old calf of T46B3 “Sedna” is just the latest development in that legacy.
While it was difficult to leave such a social bunch of whales, we had to say goodbye - but we got back to the dock with lots of happy memories and happy smiles. You never know what you will see out on the water - but it is always a time spent well.
