July 21st - Humpback mania! Heather and her breaching calf and Prowler bubblenet feeding!

After a few days of waiting for the winds to calm down we finally got back out on the water, and did our patience ever pay off! We encountered three separate groups of humpback whales , all pretty close to Nanaimo.

The first encounter was with a lone humpback whale named “Prowler” (KEX0047) who we witnessed traveling and then…. BUBBLE NET FEEDING! This is a feeding strategy used by humpback whales where they exhale bubbles underwater while swimming in a circle. The bubbles corral their prey into the centre of a circle which the humpback whale then lunges upwards through. It’s a highly developed feeding technique which is most often seen up north in Alaska. It’s only been witnessed a couple of times here in the Salish Sea!

Scarring on the fluke, likely from an entanglement

The money shot! The trailing edge of the fluke helped us ID this whale as Prowler.

The second group of whales included 5 individuals and we were able to ID Heather (BCY0160) and her new calf. Humpback whales have their calves down in the warm waters of Hawaii and Mexico and then once they’ve nursed awhile and developed a thicker layer of blubber, the mom teaches her calf how to migrate all the way up to our coast. Here she will continue to nurse the calf while she ends her fast and devours some much needed prey. We were lucky to see these two take a break from feeding and put on a show! The youngster was full of energy and did a full breach that Rebeka managed to get a photo of.

On our way home we found two more humpbacks near Ruxton Pass! A mom and calf pair were traveling north together but they weren’t fluking so unfortunately we didn’t get any IDs.

All in all, a day saturated with humpback whales and sunshine!

Thanks to everyone who joined us and we hope you’ve enjoyed the best photos taken during that tour by marine naturalist Rebeka Pirker.

Jilann LechnerJuly 24, 2020Comment