On today’s morning tour we found ourselves traveling North along Bowen Island with some familiar black and white faces. We had stumbled upon the T77 siblings, but they were missing a member of their trio! Jude seems to have left 77 siblings, hopefully both groups are heading back to their families after an extended trip away.

These little ones were being quite rambunctious playing around the boats and traveling quickly North along the Sunshine Coast.

We also encountered a single humpback in the morning, Windy. This whale was fluking and diving deep searching for taste food. Windy needs to eat about 3000 lbs of food every day during the summer in order to build up enough fat reserves for their migration south in the fall.

People often ask how we name our whales, and in most cases we vote on names for our adult whales, but sometimes they earn their nicknames through behaviours. In Windys case, they earned their nickname by farting at a group of whale watching boats!

In the afternoon our boats went out searching for the T77 siblings that we had in the morning, but they must have traveled fast after we left them as we weren’t able to find them again. Instead we found 4 humpbacks during our search! One of these humpbacks was an unknown whale, which means we haven’t been able to match them to our catalogs. This happens often when they won’t lift their tails for us, as their tail is the easiest way to ID a humpback. We have Dorsal ID’s for several of our humpbacks and that catalog is always growing, but dorsals are much harder to match.

We also came across Raptor, a know female whale, who was logging at the surface. This behaviour is common in resting or sleeping humpbacks, as they shut down half their brain while the other half stays alert to watch for danger and to remind them to surface and breath. After their short nap Raptor gave a big wave with their tail by doing a cartwheel. This is when a humpback will flip half it’s body out of the water. Unlike a half-breech, where the top half of the whale comes out, a cartwheel is usually where the bottom half of the body comes up out of the water. This usually creates a very large spray and splash of water!

Our boats also happened across yet more humpbacks, this time a pair known as MMX0132 and Uluka. All whales, whether they are orca or humpback, have a number. This is kind of like a scientific name, but for each individual whale. This way scientists and naturalists can have unique nicknames for the whales, based on personal experiences, but still have an understanding of who the whale is for research purposes. MMX0132 is an example of one of our humpbacks who doesn’t have a nickname yet, so they still go by their scientific number. When it comes time to give this whale a nickname, we are likely to name them based on markings on their tail that are obvious and make it easy to ID them from a photo on the water.

Enjoy the photos our naturalists took during the trips this day!