In an effort to combat my impulse to hide in the house through the dark winter days, I packed the toddler up this morning for a trip to the local zoo. I was just unloading the stroller from the parked car when I got a call from another member of the household, reporting orcas swimming past the house, twelve miles away. Figures! But, learning that they were southbound, I went about my day as planned, knowing that they would more than likely turn north and pass by again before sunset. Read the toddler a book, scan the water with the binoculars. Fold a load of laundry, scan the water with the binoculars. Etc.
Sure enough, around 3:30 I spotted some blows in the distance, and was able to watch them pass for about an hour. They were far away, I could only spot the occasional tall male's fin, but saw lots of blows and there was a fair amount of breaching and cartwheeling going on too. I knew I'd loose sight of them when the sun set, but just before the sun went down it broke from behind the clouds and turned the water a peachy-pink color. The sunlight hit the orcas' blows so that they glowed a deeper pink, and it became very easy to see that there were an awful lot of them out there. Beautiful! I later heard reports that members of all three resident family pods had been identified.
This video shows some footage of the orcas taken today from a news helicopter. The lower whale of the first pair you see swimming together is young male L-87 Onyx. At about 2:04 left in the video, the male in the top of the frame is J-1 Ruffles, oldest male in the SRKW community and my very favorite. It is likely (although I can't identify her for certain in this footage) that the female swimming with him is J-2 Granny, believed to be Ruffle's mother and also believed to be 99 years old this year. The two are rarely seen apart from each other.
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