We headed out of the Nanaimo harbour on a beautiful day heading towards a nearby report of whales. Our search took us over to snake island where we saw some blows in the distance! We headed over to the source of the blows which turned out to be a couple of humpback whales travelling together. We got a couple of surfaces with them together, enough to snap some photos of their tail flukes, IDing them as two young whales; Meqe’ (BXZ0492) and Split Fluke’s 2021 calf “Watson”!

Meqe’ is Pillar’s 2017 calf, meaning they are currently 5 years old. As you can probably tell from the name, Split Fluke’s 2021 calf, is a year old. Most whales don’t get their own name for some time. This is because there is a high mortality rate in the population, it’s estimated about a quarter of the calves don’t make it through the first year. This can be due to a variety of reasons, such as predation by Orca, entanglements, or unknown causes.

Luckily for these two they are beating the odds and seemed to be happily feeding when we found them. Meqe’ seemed to have other plans for the day though, as shortly after we started watching them he (or she) disappeared and we didn’t see them again during the encounter.

We continued to watch Watson for the rest of our hour before we left to find other wildlife. There were lots of seals and gulls on snake island so we stopped there and watched them sunning themselves. Harbour seals are great at camouflage so it’s always fun sitting and watching them since the longer you look the more you notice hidden among the rocks.

We continued the search for wildlife until we were out of time and had to return to the dock.

For the afternoon we headed back to the same area hoping that Watson was still hanging out in the same spot and sure enough there she was! She was continuing on with the same type of behaviour as the morning, doing feeding dives, showing us her tail flukes, and stopping to rest at one point.

It was a great day spent with our humpbacks and other wildlife and our onboard naturalists Cheyenne Brewster, Janine Van Der Linden, and Vanessa Vereschahen got some great photos which you can view below!

September 6th - Split Fluke's 2021 calf & Meqe' by Snake Island

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