Saturday, July 24th, 2010
Today we headed up Rosario Strait and looked at the whale bones of a grey whale carcass. (See previous reports). We went by Lummi Rocks and saw many harbor seals with lots of pups! We came across part of L pod and J pod at Henry Island. The water is deep here, and they like to fish along the shoreline. We must have just caught them after a good feeding, because it soon became apparent that it was nap time. Whatever ‘play’ they had earlier, had obviously played out. When an orca goes to sleep, its breathing is not automatic. So if they were to not consciously breathe, they would drown. To compensate for this, they put one hemisphere of their brain to sleep at a time. The other hemisphere is ‘awake’ enough to monitor their breathing and movement. They group together and slowly swim in one direction. This is nap time, which can last anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours. This was one of those two hour naps! We love to get out here and see breaches, spy hops, and all of the other acrobatics…………..but sometimes it just doesn’t happen that way. They are wild in their natural environment. This is the beauty of watching whales in the wild. We get to see them, and it’s on their time and agenda. We see them in their natural state. (By the way, guess who’s usually the first to wake up……………yes, the babies!) One of the groups we saw was the J16’s. J16, (Slick b. 1972) has four calves ranging in age from two to nineteen. Her nineteen year old is a large male called Mike, J26. He was named the year Mike Bigg the ‘father of orca whale research’ died. Mike has a very distinctive saddle patch, and he is easy to spot. We left the whales and went home through the middle of the islands. Today we spotted harbor seals, harbor porpoise, pigeon guillemots, marbled murreletts, rhinocerous auklets, a great blue heron, kingfisher, crows, eagles and turkey vultures. There were also numerous gulls. The Heerman’s gulls are beginning to make quite a showing. They are migratory, as all gulls here are except for the glaucous wing gulls.
