Renewal

It has been a long time!

When it was confirmed that J1 Ruffles had died, I lost heart for posting. The whales seemed to lose heart too.  Fewer breaches, less excitement. And very few babies, a big concern for the fragile Southern Resident population.

Two years ago, the Fraser River Chinook salmon run was dismally low.  We hardly saw the SRKW at all.  Transient Killer Whales* came in to the Salish Sea and gave my whale watch boat something to see, but I missed my friends.  Happily, they were gorging on record Chinook runs on coastal rivers, far beyond the range of my boat. 

Beginning last fall, we started to see the fruits of those record runs, when a new Lpod baby was spotted in late summer.  But sadly, that baby didn't survive.  Another huge blow came last December when J32 Rhapsody was found dead on a Vancouver Island beach, pregnant with a full-term female calf, her first.

And then J16 Slick, 42 years old, surprised us all with a brand new calf first spotted on New Year's Eve. Two more calves were born to Jpod--including Slick's own first grandcalf--and another newborn was seen with Lpod.  Four new babies!  And so far, all are doing well.  I am so grateful.

This summer has provided me a lot of time with my friends, watching the new babies play, seeing Ruffles' grandson, Ripple, growing into a healthy subadult, and Ruffles' son Blackberry growing his adult fin that looks more and more like his father's each time I see him.  L87 Onyx has been given the coveted spot of J2 Granny's foster-son, and it makes me glad to know that the orphaned Onyx and Granny have each other.

The whale boat delivers curious gifts sometimes. A couple weeks ago, I met a pair of women on the boat who were just finishing a week at a writers' retreat on Whidbey Island I have sometimes considered applying to.  They encouraged me and extolled the wonders of the retreat location, and were captivated by the whales and what I could tell them about their social structure.  We spent most of the southbound cruise in deep conversation, speculating about the whales' ways of being.  I felt really energized by the encounter.  In what I am sure is a related development, in recent days my muse has been pestering me to write for a wider audience than just myself, so I'm reactivating this blog to that end.  We'll see what the muse has in mind for me next.

*There are those in the research community who insist upon calling these whales Bigg's Killer Whales, or even Bigg's Whales, after Dr. Michael Bigg, who is considered the "father of whale research" in these parts.  (J26 Mike is named in his honor, too.)  My personal feeling is that we shouldn't call animals after people, who are, after all, animals too. More on this later.